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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 ;)
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.
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.
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
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Kscd had a bunch of work done to it and is improved for KDE 3.0 just to let you know.
The kde usability group http://usability.kde.org itself has been going through kde applications and writing up reports on applications (both ui and bug reports). (We don't just sit down in a room with 10 mom's and do ui studies.) So even though Corel is no longer sending in reports kde still has someone working on improving the ui.
We have also started an app of the week on the mailinglist. So come every Monday we all take a look at one of the kde applications and begin to make up a lists of changes that should be implimented to make the application better. By the end of the week the majority of these changes have been handed off to someone who will get them into cvs. If you are interested in helping out in this effort or just interested in writing up a list of things in an application that don't follow the ui standard head on over to the website and join the mailinglist. Can't code, but want to help out in kde? This might be a perfect spot for you to contribute.
We are also working on improving the website to allow for usabity reports to be given just like the current kde bug report system so you can submit items with minimal effort.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
...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?
I think things are looking pretty damn rosey for Corel... and, ultimately, for us consumers.
If, by "consumers", you mean people who purchase quality software, I agree with you. But there are the incalculable number of people in the "open source movement" who have never contributed to any open source project, couldn't compile code if their lives depended on it, and just want free software. Those people will be up in arms and decrying Corel's sound business decision as traitorous and tragic.
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.
I guess you don't understand what I was talking about. I am not talking about coming up with the new xyz widget or abc way of doing things I am talking about simply going through applications and make sure that they use the word Quit and not Exit, that the application can resize properly, the tooltips match what objects do, etc. It isn't the most wonderfull job in the world, but more often then not it is these little things that drive people up the wall. We are improving the consistancy of applications within kde.
Think of it as polishing up your car. You don't really need to, but when you do it makes your car look so much better. (and we do file bug reports too when we find them)
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
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
Guess I can retire this topic icon
As others have pointed out, you shouldn't retire it. I might suggest updating it, though.
-Erik
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.
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.
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.
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.....