Slashdot Mirror
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 ;)
The icon is actually a year out of date anyway. :-) They have a new logo now.
I know there's some work being done on improving the interface to kscd, and while their mockups are nice, code would be even better.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
[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.
Sig is taking a break!
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.
Open source or not, working and then giving away your work will not give you money, and won't make a software company work...
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.
Linux community != Open Source community.
As far as I know, there were never open source or free (libre) versions of Draw or WordPerfect. Releasing a linux binary is not contributing to the open source community.
I am aware they contributed some other packages, but the big two were never offered.
This seems to be the trend now that the novelty and excitement surrounding Linux has died out.
It is not a sound business model to develop apps and games for Linux for several reasons.
1: Linux doesn't control enough of the desktop market.
2: Most users of Linux apt-get (or the RedHat equivalent) their software. (eg: aren't going to pay for much)
3: It's difficult to develop for every distribution. Most commmercial software is made to run on RedHat. I use Debian. I'm SOL.
4: Those who use RedHat and consider buying software worry about products being discontinued, like this.
Same thing happened to Loki. They did a really good job porting games to Linux, but sales were pathetic.
I remember going into Electronics Boutique a year ago. They had a rack with the $50 Linux software right in front of the store. I went into the store last week all the software was gone. Was it sold? No. It was moved to the back of the store and marked down to $9. I bought Loki's release of Quake II for the tin it came in.
I wouldn't buy software when a semi-working version is available for free. Especially if I thought it would be discontinued.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
Anyone have any idea what the sales figures were like on their Linux division products?
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.
e4 e5
Guess I can retire this topic icon ;)
.NET to FreeBSD, which is a very big deal. Don't write Corel off just yet. ;)
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
DISCLAIMER: I work for Corel, but I do not speak on their behalf. My opinions are my own.
----- rL
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).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
In the fiscal quarter ended 11/01, they lost 12 cents per share, and in the three quarters prior thereto they had profits of 1, 2, and 2 cents per share, respectively. The per-share loss for fiscal year '02 (ending 11/02, based on two analysts' estimates) is exepcted to be 22 cents per share. In FY '03 they are expected to make only 6 cents per share.
Having a profitable company give back to the community by supporting an open source web site is a good gesture, but Corel needs to focus on more important things at the moment.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
...to save Linux from the deadly Word Perfect virus. Everything that Word Perfect has touched since MS first brought out Office has died a horrible pathetic death. The original corporation died quickly, and sold the product to Novell. They were a monster, kicking serious MS butt in the network. All but irrelevant now, alas, they've pretty much disappeared since buying the Cursed Code. Now Corel is the latest victim, going from a strong company making great products to a confused drifter with decent ideas but a total failure of execution. If we're lucky, Corel broke it's ties to Linux before the WP curse could spread to it. Otherwise, Linux would be doomed to bloat, lack of direction, costly failed attempts to expand presence on users desks...oh, damn, too late. Maybe there's still time to fix it, though.
Come to think of it, everything that the original Office competed with died messily, with huge collateral damage to everything close to it. 123 didn't go alone, even Lotus is now just a division of IBM. God help us all if Bill G can find the phone number of the sorcerer he hired for that job again. Yikes.
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
The paranoid might see a conspiracy as Microsoft now owns 25% of Corel but Corel CEO, Derek Burney, said recently that they are still looking at selling the Linux apps. Since their recent cash problems they have had a razor sharp focus on not offering products unless they can make a profit. Some have said that they should still offer them even if it was only a software download off their web site or CDs with pdf manuals. Burney said they are looking at that but then there are the support costs to consider. Copies of WordPerfect8 are still around and since it is native to Linux it still runs on all distros. WordPerfect 2000(L) is available for download on Morphious. It has the full suite but since it runs on WINE it can be a bit harder to install. I remember when I had it installed at work. A secretary who had never heard of Linux before sat down and started to use it with no problems since it was identical to the windows version. Corel was criticised at the time for trying to imitate windows and not being Linux enough but when it comes down to it you want something people can easily use if you want to get companies to switch over. I hope they can get back to selling it in the future.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
If they instead concentrated on making their applications work perfectly on linux (complete with easy installer for the large dists), and spent the extra energy on helping along other ease of use efforts that would be a good thing. Look at Ximian for an example.
What about the original darpa net
The one built by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency? Defense as in U.S. Department of Defense? Somehow I doubt the US government "wrote off" its expenses, considering it doesn't pay taxes to itself. And the government spends extraordinary amounts of money on countless research projects just like darpanet, expecting a return on investment on only a few of them. The government can do that. Corporations can't, unless there is a reasonable expectation for success. And judging by the number of failed/failing open source companies out there right now, why should there be any expectation for success in that field?
It'd be nice if they actually had ported their programs to Linux.
WordPerfect 8 is a native Linux app.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
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.
Why would IBM have any interest whatsoever in breaking up Microsoft? IBM needs for there to be a strong desktop presence in order to drive its core business (enterprise servers), and Microsoft does that better than anybody. I don't think IBM is particularly interested in entering the mass-consumer/business desktop software market. IBM even ships Microsoft software on their low-end server and desktop products.
Sun is dead. They'll go the way of DEC by the end of the decade. They picked up on Linux way too late.
AOL is probably the most direct competitor of the three, though it is hard to imagine how embracing Linux would help them gain any sort of advantage in the ISP market. AOL already comes pre-installed on practically every computer anyways. Again, AOL greatly benefits from a mass-produced, easy-to-use desktop. Would AOL be around if Microsoft (and Intel) hadn't created the commoditized PC? It's hard to imagine how.
Corel did a lot of damage to the free software community by distributing WP 2000 only as Windows binaries with a version of WINE that only worked on some Linux distros, and left all the BSD people out in the cold.
Corel totally missed the point. A native WP (similar to WP8, only not so unbeliveably buggy) would have been cool, but they didn't do it.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
WordPerfect 8 is a native Linux app.
I believe the releases which followed used Wine, however.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
There are a lot of posts about WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and its dependence on Wine, as well as about instability. Gotta add my $0.15 (it's longer than $0.02).
I bought the product right at release, and it's true: it was based on Wine. However, it was a "special" in-house version of Wine with modifications to get WordPerfect Office 2000 to run, and the Corel Wine was much faster than the WineHQ Wine at running Office applications. In addition, because Corel Wine and the WordPerfect Office 2000 binaries for Linux were tweaked for each other, they actually worked (and do work) very well together.
We musn't forget that Corel is a smallish company and WordPerfect Office 2000 is a Windows product. To do an entire native port would have been a herculean effort and probably beyond the company's realistic abilities, certainly it would have been impossible in the time frame in which they were able to release WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux.
Not to mention that many Linux users are applauding TransGaming for their Wine support and calling Wine the best way to bring Linux to the masses... You can't have it both ways; if it's good enough for TransGaming, there's no point in saying that it shouldn't be good enough for Corel.
That said, there were some problems -- the installer of the original release only properly supported the major distributions (i.e. Debian, Corel, Red Hat) while minor distributions (Caldera & others) had some trouble and required by-hand rpm'ing in some cases, or other tweaks. There were also behavior problems with non-KDE-1.x desktops which led to some crashing and other effects likely to generate a poor first impression of the product. I know of several users who returned their Corel Linux products almost immediately.
Unfortunately, the response from Corel to these problems was mixed. A new installer script was released, but a service pack to fix the crashing and non-KDE problems was never made -- which is a damn shame, because the CVS version of Corel Wine hosted at opensource.corel.com did fix both the crashing and the non-KDE-1.1 behavior bugs, leading to a very functional office suite for Linux. Some in the WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux community even packaged the CVS of Corel Wine up as an RPM and released it that way, and I continue to use the "unofficial" Corel Wine RPM to this day, every day, with my copy of WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux.
So, there is no denying that Corel may be partly at fault for releasing an undertested product and then stupidly failing to release fixes which already existed and were downloadable (albeit in difficult to use form) from their Web site.
On the other hand, seen from Corel's point of view -- very poor sales and rampant piracy (which I saw myself in several offices) -- it may have been difficult to justify spending any additional capital on the Linux products once they had been launched. The problems with smaller-name distributions and non-KDE window managers likely generated lots of tech support traffic from a few squeaky wheels and a high number of product returns, while at the same time sales were (apparently) very slow. To this day, it's surprising to me just how many Linux users positively bristle when I tell them that I actually paid for WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, rather than use an open-source alternative -- almost as though I were a Benedict Arnold for actually buying software.
All in all, it's just a sad thing altogether, because Corel was one of the few companies that really did take the plunge and release and market Linux products, and (once you got them installed properly) both WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux work very well -- better than most anything available for Linux to this point.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
That's great as long as the money's there, but now it seems these companies have bled all their cash away, leaving the community right where it was before.
:-)
...except from all the money that they pumped in of course.
The community only grows stronger when a business joins us. When a business leaves us, we _haven't_ lost anything, we have merely stopped gaining from them.
Corel has left, but the work that they put in remains and will be built upon. That is the crowning achievement of free software.
Wordperfect for linux isn't free software, and hence doesn't fall under the argument I just proposed
Guess I can retire this topic icon
As others have pointed out, you shouldn't retire it. I might suggest updating it, though.
-Erik
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?
"The scientist describes what is; The engineer creates what never was." - Theodore von Karman
providing the Linux world with versions of Corel Draw and Corel WordPerfect.
Nice to provide things that are never released for purchase.
I have tried several times to buy both those items, nobody carry's them and repeated calls and emails to Xana-whatever-their-name-is resulted in non-responses.
I still want to buy them, but I can't.
Anyone have a link to where I can actually buy thes products? I'm guessing it's now a liquidator or old product retailer.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Remember a while back when Microsoft tried to buy Corel? That was blocked by the SEC if I recall, but that didn't stop Microsoft from investing in Corel and thereby gaining influence, even if it is behind the scenes under the table influence. It was right around this time that Wordperfect for Linux was dropped as a future product, Corel Linux itself was dropped, Wine development ceased, and the price on the windows version of their Wordperfect Office suite was raised significantly. Coincidence?
The Wordperfect suite was beginning to make some inroads into Microsoft's market share before this happened. I remember you could get the Wordperfect suite for a couple hundred bucks while the Microsoft suite was five hundred if you were lucky (not counting upgrades). Now the price is higher and its progress into MS-Office territory has slowed or stopped.
Sounds to me like a case of Microsoft castrating the competition by investing in it, just like they did with Apple, although in Apple's case it was investing to keep the company alive as token "competition" rather than to remove a real threat.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Plain and simple,Corel Office was way too expensive for most users to be an incentive to buy.A price of 80-100 CAD (50 - 70 US$ for those of you south of the border)would've give them the volume to make up in lower price.It's simply called not knowing the market you're trying to sell to.
As for Corel Linux...that deserves no real comments,a distro incompatible with it's parent or other distros (one huge kde package ) with an "all or nothing" installer (never fixed) and completely out of sync with the fast evolving Linux software (can we say here Debian unstable).
Plain and simple,bad management and expectations clouding the reallity.
The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it. Alan Saporta
There seems to be this intended but mistakenly wrong theme that Linux is
...... so on and so on...
dying here.
Where the fact is that Linux was much more dead last year and the year
before and so on and so on, then it is today as it enters more and more
government supported uses and propogates into different types of consumer
devices and
Linux is spreading further and further and just because there are cases
where it appears to not have made investors money doesn't mean that it's
not generating value. For if it wasn't generating value, then it certainly
wouldn't be growing and extending into new areas and uses. Value doesn't
have to be in the direct stockmarket holder form of money.
It seems to me that the abstraction manipulation methodology of applying
selective connotations in marketing practices is heavy at work here. In a
place where you'd think there is to be more naturally supportive of linux
community it seems to be exposing Microsoft viral infilteration of not
only Slashdot but given article of recent, perhaps the OSDN organization.
And to think MS accused Linux, or more specifically the GPL as being a
Viral License. Typical act of making a claim against another and then
commiting it yourself. As was perhaps first done by Bill Gates yelling
"Piracy" and making TIME Magizine front Cover for it.
What of Corel, really?
They are a business for profit and as any successful business which also
contribute to Open Source Software and even to GPL and GNU software knows,
you generally don't make it your main business. Perhaps the rule should be
10% to commonwealth baseline development?
Many have said support is where you make your money with linux, yet a
Corel employee mentions here that their Linux based products resulted in
more call for support that they were not charging for (due to selling
closed source linux based products for profit which included free support.)
Perhaps they needed to get everything set on the same page, rather than
mixing pages from closed source practices and open sources practices?
Corel has for years been struggling and thru various partnerships. That is
a clear indication that it's not a Linux or other product problems but
rather an internal business control problem, probably one called
management.
Isn't this a shortsighted view? We really have to be more adaptable to different models. The proprietary model is not required to make money. Other business models work as well. For example, generic products can be sold profitably. 'Bayer Aspirin' is sold profitably beside generic 'Aspirin' and ASA tablets. Also as an example, many people make money by using the English language well. They do not own it, but they teach it, they write it, they help people with it, they package it, they use it. And they profit from it. Also, Patents and copyrights run out, and then the intellectual property flows into the public domain. The way in which you make money changes, and models change too.
I need to pay more attention to my "there", "theirs", etc..
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Also, if desktops run UNIX-like systems (like GNU) it becomes much easier for a UNIX company like Sun to make products that work together with other products.
Desktop Unix is dead. Sun lost that battle ten years ago.
Only problem is that when FreeBSD (or GNU/Linux) starts to gain more space in serverspace, it might mean that Solaris sales drop and Sun will become weaker to help us.
But this is inevitable, right? Everybody is moving their servers to Linux, so where does that leave Sun with its expensive, proprietary products? I think the comparison to DEC is appropriate; DEC supported Unix when it exploded in the 80's, but only just. It really wanted to sell you VMS. Sun is supporting Linux, but really they want to sell you Solaris.
Is it just me, or does it seem funny that Corel have said: "...this site will no longer be available as of March 1st, 2002...", and on the very next line: "At Corel, we have developed a strong commitment to the Open Source community..."?
And now they're jumping into enterprice process management and XML content solutions... It's possible that Cowpland wasnt the problem too.
The new strategy of 'investing to capture high-growth emerging markets' sounds suspiciously like 'we're gonna throw our money at any bandwagon we can find'.
People always complainn about the failures in the Linux community, however the percentage of success in the linux community is greater than the Windows community.
You see, in all industries most businesses fail, in the technology industry most businesses have failed, all the dot coms that went down, all the software companies that Microsoft put out of businessl, you honestly think Linux companies are abnormal because most of them are inn the red? Most companies period are in the red.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
IBM doesn't really care about it's desktop presence. It's been a money losing area for them for years and they have recently decided to stop manufacturing their own desktop computers.
Exactly. Microsoft owns the desktop, and IBM doesn't want it. So what exactly is this perceived conflict between Microsoft and IBM?
The tension between Sun and IBM is much greater since they are going after the same market. They're going after each other much more than they are going after Microsoft.
Sun doesn't give a damn about selling Solaris. They care about selling hardware; and they make fucking *great* hardware. If Linux ran as well on high-end hardware as Solaris, Sun would be... well, maybe not *happy* to get out of the OS business, but *willing.*
They don't make money off their OS. They make money off their hardware. Linux does not yet scale as well to multi-processor machines (that is, hardware with *dozens* of processors). When Linux *does* support this class of machine as nicely as Solaris, Sun will most likely offer Linux on the high-end, as well.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Let's pretend we are in 1983. Someone may write the following:
And judging by the number of failed/failing video game companies out there right now, why should there be any expectation for success in that field?
For people not familiar with the history of video games, Atari was really big between 1980 and 1982. Then, in 1983, something happened: Too many video game companies were out there, and companies, in the false expectation of the market continuing its exponential growth, were spending more money than they were making. A familiar story to anyone who watched the .com madness.
Just like the .coms in 2001, the video game industry in 1983 had a big crash, resulting in an economic slump in the tech industry.
However, the Favicon NES came out in 1983/1984, and, with Super Mario Brothers, was able to make video games sucessful again. By 1987, the video game industry was thriving again, but this time with more reasonable expectations.
While a number of open source companies are no more (hello, Eazel), a large number of open-source companies are still alive and thriving (RedHat, in particular, is incredibly sucessful).
People thought video games were a dying fad in 1984, like the Rubic's cube and Espirt clothing. People think open source is a dying fad in 2002, like N'Sync and that special effect moving the perspecive while the action is frozen. Just as video games are alive and well today, open source will be alive and well in 20 years.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
I own tons of Microsoft Windows software from companies that have disapeared and gone down the tubes. This "risk" exists for all platforms.
About the only thing I see having gone from the Linux world are all the make-money-fast-and-get-rich startups. Loki didn't succeed but, dare I point out, lasted longer than a large number of Windows gaming companies I know.
There are lots of significant developments in our community happening that have interesting potential for the longterm.
Finally, let me assure you that the novelty is not over for those looking for a platform that isn't controlled by a single company that forces upon its customers a paradigm shift every two years.
Sure a lot of air bags got deflated last year, but thats a good thing in the long term for Linux-- not a bad thing.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
mmm 'K ... but uhh "capitalism" can't survive without vast public investment, without selfless non-profit oriented labour (like raising kids, reproducing, etc). When will people learn that what they think of as "capitalism" (it's not clear what most people think this is ...) is not some kind of "reality" that all social and economic activity must deal with ... it's just a way of organizing society (i.e. commercial and adminstrative law, the division of wealth, access to poltical power, etc.). Whole societies and eras of history were organized completely differently - around religion, tradition, etc. They came and went ... so will "capitalism".
Capitalism is unique only in its quality of being highly "productive" by some raw measures (but it's destructive and wasteful too ... its productivity allows for plastic Disney characters that are manufactured in China to be shipped by airplane to air conditioned McDonalds in Texas - wow what an accomplishment!). The other unique thing is that it is currently the predominant legal and economic system of most (not all) societies - it is layered over many other traditional forms of of social relations of course, on which it depends in various ways. Because we live in a temporal universe and capitalism exists "now", many (especially the young and those averse to analysis) believe that it is the "end" of history, or the "last and best" system. They seem blinded to the massive changes that capitalism has itself undergone in the last 50 years or to the tension and contradiction inherent in a hyperproductive system which does not distribute wealth (or opportunity) in a politically sustainable way.
BTW historically speaking the software industry was essentially a creation of government, as well, money is the creation of government, the legal system on which economic activity rests is maintained by government. In fact all the things that are of importance to social life where one cannot "make money" fall outside of the purview of capitalism.
Of course some argue that the ability to profit in certain domains (e.g. by raising children or treating the ill) is simply a function of the relative "freedom" afforded by given societies to do so (and that capitalism and this freedom go hand in hand). But whether one society chooses to allow more or less of this "freedom" is completely arbitrary and is not related to some fundamental quality of human beings or human societies. Denmark and the U.S. have different health care systems. Danes are free to worry less about their aging parents affecting their bank accounts, Americans are free form corporations that are more competitive than existing firms and thus to make money caring for the elderly. Maybe Danes are worse off than Americans ... it's hard to measure these kinds of things. It's clear Danes and Americans are both better of than the people of Mali and that capitalism hasn't functioned too well in terms of closing the gap between Mali and developed countries. I wonder how long it will take ?
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.....
Corel dropped a big advantage. I can use that old CD to install under an older version of Red Hat and ship .wp documents to most government offices. Those same offices won't touch unstable MicroSquish formats. You would think that they could have sold plenty of this. How on earth did they let such a huge advantage slip away like that? My siser is a lawer, she curses her desktop daily.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
You're missing the point. GNU/Linux is gaining desktop space also.
...
Yeah, but Linux is not Unix. Unix will never own the desktop. Whether Linux will own the mass-business/consumer desktop is up in air.
And a UNIX server is much more likely backend for GNU/Linux desktop than NT on the otherhand supports Windows desktops in more "native" way.
Probably _the_ killer app for Linux is Samba which is expressly for using Windows clients with Linux servers. Most Internet (web, e-mail) servers are some sort of Unix, and most clients are Windows. So Windows and Linux can definitely get along with each other
Desktop Unix is dead. Sun lost that battle ten years ago.
I think this statement is premature. Desktop Unix isn't dead. Maybe GNOME and KDE aren't ready for the mainstream, but Mac OS X certainly is, and it's indisputably a Desktop Unix system...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay