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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.
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
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.