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Corel Shuts Down Open Source Development Site
evil_one writes: "The
end is finally here for Corel, who released a Debian based linux distro a couple years ago (now owned by Xandros) Has announced that they are shutting down their Open Source Development web site as of March 1st. As many readers already know, Corel has helped the community on a huge scale, providing the Linux world with versions of Corel Draw and Corel WordPerfect. It's sad to see this, especially with the amount of work that Corel has put into Wine and their other projects, which include add-ons to KDE."
Guess I can retire this topic icon ;)
Oh, yeah, a rosy future as, maybe, Microsofts 'token' competition. They're still bleeding money, and are only alive because it was worth Microsoft $135M to get them out of producing Linux software.
Corel has written some nice products, but the mass consumer productivity software industry is dead. On one hand you can sell to corporations and the only way you can do that is if your name is Microsoft, or on the other hand you can try selling to endusers, but they're either on the windows or mac platforms making (illegal) copies of MS Office and you'd have to pay them not to, or they're on Linux and have so many free alternatives that you'd again have to pay most of them to use something else. In the end, they could make the best products in the universe and it wont matter because there isnt anyone who will buy them.
So Corel knows this too, and are shifting away from their dead markets, and into 'technical illustrations', 'Enterprise Process Management' and 'XML Content Solutions. Well, for technical illustrations Corel is lowend, and unlikely to reach the profitable customers, and the other two fields are buzzword intensive fields with strong established players where they again arent exactly playing in corporate space.
I cant really imagine what rosy future you see for either consumers or Corel in this situation.
I think your view of .NET is a little clouded by the fact that Microsoft is involved. Sure Microsoft has demonstrated monopolistic practises, but when is the last time they released a standard to ECMA and then purposely broke it?
.NET runtime will be seen in the open source community without those libraries anyway.
.NET if you want to, but you're doing it at your own peril.
You cannot do this if you are chasing standards Microsoft sets.
The standards are now in ECMA's hands to maintain. Sure, Microsoft can change libraries they don't release to standards organizations, but I believe that the benefit of the
So write of GNOME (Ximian's Mono Project, to be more specific, GNOME hasn't decided to incorporate Mono yet) and
----- rL