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Corel Ousted From Public Life?
gagy writes "Ottawa's Corel Corp. has been showing signs of weakness in the past few years, and looks very likely to be bought out by Vector Corp, at which point it will become a privately held company. A Toronto Star story spells out the details of the deal, and takes a brief look at the history of Corel." We mentioned Corel's deal with Vector last month.
WordPerfect corporation was bought first by Novell, and then by Corel, by which time WordPerfect was already losing out to Microsoft's products.
However, it's too late. Enough WordPerfect code has been stolen for the OSS project, Open Office, that there's no way to put the genie back in the bottle and profit from our hard earned IP.
Do we have another SCO in the making? For the record, OpenOffice code is based on StarOffice (bought from some company by SUN, and later donated).
S
Kenneth Cowpland? Don't you mean Michael Cowpland and his plastic wife and pink dog?
Not to mention that they burned a lot of goodwill in the Linux community (one of the few viable non-Microsoft markets) when they abandoned their Linux line.
/etc/printcap file to get them to print to it. These problems that I was sure would be fixed within weeks of release in a service pack are still here years later.
When Corel released WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and Corel Draw/PhotoPaint 9 for Linux, there was an incredible marketing push. I got samples. I also got Tux plush toys, balloons, beach balls, "Corel Linux" stress cubes, posters and other branding-oriented products sent to me.
I was one of the individuals to decide to pony up $$$ for some trial installations of WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux and Corel Draw 9 for Linux, thinking that these were bigtime apps. The initial release was somewhat (incredibly, you found as time wore on,) buggy, but with service packs already available for the Windows version and assurances that the Linux product line represented a major long-term investment by Corel, I was reasonably confident that the product was viable.
Well... As the weeks turned into months and still no service packs at all, the Corel Office for Linux newsgroup filled up with more and more dissatisfied people wondering about the crashing, the incompatibilities with LPR, and a million other little bugs that had yet to be addressed.
Fast-forward to 2003... The products are orphaned. They have been removed from the Corel Web site without a trace. There has never been so much as a peep out of corel about them since the initial product launch and marketing push. To get anyone at Corel on the phone who even admits that such products ever existed is damn near impossible. The open-source linux.corel.com site that contained Corel's WINE tree is gone.
And no service packs for the Linux versions of these programs ever got released!
In Red Hat 8, they're still unstable, they still sometimes simply error out when you try to save a file you've been working on (can you say "lost work"?), more obscure parts of the programs still tend to crash them or display broken dialogs, and you still have to run a second font server and hand-massage your
In Red Hat 9, the programs don't install at all. There's a fundamental incompatibility with NTPL. If you grab the Red Hat 8 libraries and use them with an LD_LIBRARY_PATH, you can get the apps to install and run, but they don't save or spool print jobs at all no matter what you do, and they have a tendency to simply turn into runaway processes at the slightest irritation.
And to add final insult to injury, we've recently discovered that about 75% of the files created by the Linux versions of WordPerfect Office 2000 can't be opened by the Windows versions of Corel's products. Old files created with these apps are very orphaned.
I'll never buy Corel again for any reason! And I've heard from other people using Linux in varied environments that who also spent $$$ on the Corel licenses that feel much the same way. They could have ruled the Linux world if they'd stuck with it. Instead, they screwed many thousands of decision-makers who won't ever want to smell them again.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It is probably a good thing OpenOffice.org has abandoned that integrated desktop UI that the original StarOffice had. If they felt like improving it they could have run afoul of this patent held by Corel: US Patent No. 20030090519
This patent might be something those KParts and Bonobo-UI guys would want to look at, in case this Vector company or someone that buys them goes the profit-by-IP-lawsuit route.
Hint: read the claims and description. The abstract is rather useless.
DCMonkey
I'd say that pretty much all the real functionality was in it by version 6 (I'm hard pressed to find anything important missing from WP6 that is in the latest verison, save automatic underlining on misspelled words) and that Corel merely added a few features to give them an excuse to release new versions.
Anyway, the writing has been on the wall for years now..