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Corel Shuts Down Open Source Development Site

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the no-surprise-there dept.

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 ;)

14 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by johnburton · · Score: 2, Interesting

    [quote]Guess I can retire this topic icon [/quote] Corel aren't going away as far as I know. Just not doing open source any more. Many people think that non-open source is just as important as open source software. In fact probably more so.

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  2. Open Source Theory by IgD · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I think open source is a great idea just like free love but I don't think it will ever really succeed. I think that a lot of open source sites are headed in the same direction as Corel's. The problem you can't make money off of open source. You can't survive in a capitalist society if you can't make money.

    My theory about open source is that Linux in particular is being privately funded by IBM, Sun, AOL and other big companies with the sole intention of breaking up Microsoft. I have no doubt that Linux will be sucessful in eventually becoming the predominant desktop OS. After all, how can Microsoft even with it's monopoly power compete with a product that is free that has similar or better performance?

    1. Re:Open Source Theory by Leinies · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I think that you need to take a look at all of the great GPL projects (at gnu.org or freshmeat.net). Many of these projects have no corporate affiliation and are just groups of people interested in helping other people.

      Another large source of funding for free software (Stallman doesn't like the term "open source") or open source is the US government. Many large scientific software projects are at least open source. The DOE funds programs like Globus.org, CDAT and Vis5d. Also, most large scientific modeling projects are open source.

  3. A bridge to Linux from Windows now gone...sad... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The benefits to Wine aside, one of the most unique parts of the Corel Linux distro and the apps is that, not only did it improve relations with the mainstream users used to M$ office suites, but it was one of the few distros that you could actually keep your Windows partition and still have Linux functionality (albeit in one huge honking file). All you had to do was double-click a Windows icon, and Windows disappears to be replaced by a user-friendly X desktop, and then back again when you're done.

    This would've gone a long way had it been better promoted and developed, to expose the masses or attract the curious and adventurous Windows folks into the realm of Linux and its other software. Sad, but I hope someone else picks this idea up and markets an easy-to-use distribution just for Windows users.

  4. Sales figures? by Forkenhoppen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone have any idea what the sales figures were like on their Linux division products?

    1. Re:Sales figures? by aussersterne · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Very poor. This is the reason for WordPerfect Office for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux being effectively pulled after the initial production run.

      To make matters worse, tech support needs for Linux products were greater, apparently because the few users they did manage to sell their Linux products to were "newbies" rather than Linux veterans, who don't seem to buy software at all.

      This info comes from my calling Corel's sales and tech support to inquire about the Linux products line in the process of writing an article.

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    2. Re:Sales figures? by Alan+Shutko · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The tech support needs were greater for Linux products because their Linux products were extremely buggy and were never patched.

      There were a number of non-newbies who bought their software. But many advertised features were still broken. Many features of the Windows suite were not available in the Linux version because of WINE limitations, even something as simple as loading a document in a running instance of WP (ie, from a browser). It had varied problems with things like window management with different window managers, font difficulties caused by interactions between their font server and other font servers....

      The only way to get a fairly stable WPO2k/Linux or Draw/Linux installation was beyond most users, as it required downloading an unsupported CVS version of corelwine and recompiling it (twice to work with both Draw and WPO2k). And when you did that, you broke the online help.

      In other words, sales figures were poor because the software was not worth buying. I have both WPO2k and Draw for Linux, and don't have either installed, because they aren't worth using.

  5. Half assed by JohnBE · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Corel Draw and others were practically emulated through the Wine libraries. If they mean business they should have made native Linux apps. The idea of having CMYK support under Linux is a bit of a wet-dream at the moment...

    They did however give out free CD's at Defcon and other interesting conferences (I've still got a few). So to say that they were entirely half assed is wrong, they did actively pursue support. Their distros were not all that though.

    Corel Ventura would have been excellent for Linux, because it is a pretty neat DTP solution and Linux really needs some heavy duty DTP software that can be used in production environments.

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  6. No, you can't retire that icon just yet. by rlowe69 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Guess I can retire this topic icon ;)

    I know you're kidding, but Corel is still doing interesting things in the Unix community that the Slashdot crowd will probably be very interested in, particularly the port of .NET to FreeBSD, which is a very big deal. Don't write Corel off just yet. ;)

    DISCLAIMER: I work for Corel, but I do not speak on their behalf. My opinions are my own.

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  7. No, it's all because of no sales. by aussersterne · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm sure this had nothing to do with the $135 million investment from Microsoft Corp, not.....

    It doesn't. If you have called Corel to try to order any of ther Linux products, you will find that they are all "out of print" and are not available for purchase. If you ask why, you will be told that there was absolutely no demand -- not enough interest in the products even to justify keeping a few copies around for sale.

    Linux users just don't by software (except me, who bought WordPerfect Office for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux during the brief moment when they were available, and use them every day).

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    1. Re:No, it's all because of no sales. by digitalEric · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I disagree. Corel may tell you that there was "no demand". But, I think a better way to put it would be:

      There was enough less demand for their Linux products that Corel would not have made $135 million on profit on them.

      Risky projects like Corel's Linux initiatives are the first to go when lean times come. But saying that Microsoft's investment wasn't involved is silly -- if the investment came without strings attached, they would have been able to continue their Linux operations. Or, at least they would still have some support for those products! I used WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS well after the release of Win95, and still got fantastic support for it. But just try and get support for one of their less-than 2 year old Linux products!

      > Linux users just don't by(sic) software (except me ...

      Actually, very few people buy all the software they use. I also bought WordPerfect for Linux, and would have bought Corel Draw! for Linux except that I didn't hear about it until it had already been discontinued. I know about 10 people who used Corel's Linux products, and at least 8 of them paid for legal licenses.

      IIRC, a similar thing happend a few years back when Apple was still early in the process of incorporating the NeXT tree into what would become OS X. At that time, Apple was talking about the possibility of selling "Rhapsody" (sp?) for x86 hardware in addition to Macintoshes. Some money was transfered (I don't know the specifics) from Microsoft to Apple, and all talk of MacOS running on x86 PCs vanished.

  8. Re:It'd be nice if... by Time+Doctor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    WordPerfect 8 is a native Linux app.

    I believe the releases which followed used Wine, however.

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    Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
  9. Time to retire Corel's icon... by sfrenchie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ya think?

    Maybe you should have retired that logo last January when Corel announced their new and improved logo.

    Not that I really like the new logo with that strange looking bald guy. But lets get with the times eh?

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    "The scientist describes what is; The engineer creates what never was." - Theodore von Karman
  10. Corel Going the Way of the Dodo by PingXao · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Unlike the dot-bombs, Corel has been in a period of slow, steady decline. I heard an anecdote while working for a law firm some months ago. To wit: Apparently Bill Gates' father is a big lawyer muckety-muck somewhere and Bill questioned him on why it is that almost all lawyers and law firms in the U.S. were married to WordPerfect. (This was true of every law firm I ever dealt with, and that includes District Attorney offices on every level. Whenever I needed to produce a document that needed to be shared I had to convert it from Word into WordPerfect format.) The answer he got was twofold: (1) Inertia. That's just the way it is and it's always been that way so why change? and (2) There were some WordPerfect idiosyncracies that WordPerfect had that MS Word couldn't duplicate. What those are in particular, I'm not sure, but I would guess it involves hot-key commands (which are plentiful in WP) and "Show Control Codes" or some such function that lets you edit and touch up all the hidden commands that actually perform the special formatting for the WSYWIG output. Lawyers wouldn't even consider moving to a word processor that couldn't do that. I know I've struggled with Word formatting quite a bit as I'm sure everyone else has. Eventually it gets so frustrating that you just give up and settle for letting Word do what it wants to do.

    At any rate, Bill decided that MS Word should be the legal Word Processor Uber Alles and directed his minions to make it so. As of today, he still hasn't succeeded in his goal AFAIK. The MS investment in Corel might be directed toward continued progress in that regard. As soon as Microsoft can supplant WordPerfect as the word processor of choice on legal desktops everywhere (at least in the U.S.), WordPerfect's and Corel Suite or whatever's usefulness will have ended.

    Lawyers and law firms may just be the biggest single user group of Corel's office suite left. They may be the only customers that keep it alive. There are certainly enough of them to keep WordPerfect (and possibly Corel itself) alive for some time to come. When they finally switch (resistance is futile), WordPerfect will probably die and Corel will finally execute it's final CFIT. That's aviation terminology for "Controlled Flight Into Terrain".

    Imagine, Microsoft - the Evil Empire - at long last in bed with not only its own lawyers, but all lawyers everywhere - Satan's Spawn on Earth. The Horror.... the horror.....