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Dropping Linux Helped Restore Corel Profitability
basotl writes "Newsforge is reporting that Corel attributes part of its financial comeback to dropping Corel Linux and its Linux office suite. Though they are not currently offering products for Linux, they are interested in prospect in the future." From the article: "Looking back, Brown describes the decision to drop Corel Linux as 'a successful strategy for Corel and an early step toward the refocusing of our business. At the time we knew that Corel's core focus was moving away from the operating system to concentrate more on our application offerings, and this would almost certainly have an impact on the level of service we could afford to customers and users of Corel Linux.' Nor, as a company struggling to regain profitability, was Corel inclined to try to develop the GNU/Linux market by continuing to support WordPerfect for Linux."
Corel Linux just really seemed like a "me too" product and it never seemed clear why it existed.
There was a Corel Linux?
Summation 2
Its saying that a company with desktop applications isn't going to make a profitable business selling those applications on Linux, nor should an application company sell its own OS as a core focus (they aren't big enough to be MS).
Sensible chap.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Of course, Microsoft had nothing to do with it when they threw money at Corel, and when Corel stopped making WordPerfect for Linux, they promptly divested. /cough/spit/
Corel Linux was a mistake, when they could have simply continued to sell WP for Linux (I still have the boxed set for 8.0!). It's not like they didn't have an existing code base that worked in X.
As much as I like WP, if they come up with yet another Wine based WP instead of native, I and a lot of others will simply stay away in droves.
--
BMO
Who would have thought the massive payoffs from Microsoft to drop Linux support would make them more profitable?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Does none remember that Corel was bought by Microsoft? Does Microsoft not have a controlling-interest in Corel process and operations? So they dropped their Linux offers and claim to have regained value, yet have not the common courtesy to refer to Linux as a service-oriented technology? Sure Linux is a liability if the company doesn't use it for a profitable purpose. Business-101 isn't what Corel needs, because it is evident propoganda Microsoft directs through its subsidiaries it buys into. This is no different than how Microsoft inducted SCO to harass and issue false titles and false claim to Intellectual Property owners in competition.
without prejudice
A company that targets a niche market may have less opportunities to make lots of money than one that targets the mass market. Obviously this is not always true. However, it is going to be a serious consideration for some companies when choosing a platform/market/whatever.
Disclaimer: I use a Mac daily and certainly appreciate niche markets. But the fact remains that a product catering to a niche may not always be as profitable.
Four years ago, Corel shutdown their OSS site and now they are seeing a return to stability. While it is debatable whether their OSS division was the direct cause of financial hardship, it certainly seems to have been a factor.
:)
It would be good if Corel made a return to OSS, but I don't think it'll happen any time soon. If it does, I don't expect it to be nearly the same scale. Then again, GNU/Linux is expected to take over the world in 10 years, so who knows
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From what I've heard, Xandros has been profitable the past couple years. They just released Version 4, Home Edition last week and a server product a few months before that.
Corel had not only a Linux distro, but also their WordPerfect Office and Photopaint Linux apps as well. These apps are not sold or supported by Xandros.
oops, slahsdot removed the arrow in the parent's title...
The Corel Linux product was sold to Xandros Inc and became Xandros Linux.
We have a Corel icon?
Great Intellect...
How can anybody base his ordinary software on Wine. Wine is an emergency solution which should only be used to bring your desperately needed third party product to run on Linux for a limited time but never ever to sell your product. Any Wine application is still an ordinary Windows application following the Windows design and UI guidelines.
Just go back and look at the discussion about Google's Picasa here at Slashdot. No sensible person is satisfied with it, all it achieves is showing Google's incompetence to produce real Linux applications. Releasing a Wine solution just shows that Google capitulated from being able to build ordinary Linux applications.
Yet Corel doesn't do better than Google or any of the other vendors who don't sell Linux applications, they all don't know how to do cross-platform development efficiently. It's completely understandable that none want to pay for a second development line for a platform which hasn't more than a few percents market share. But this isn't needed if you do your development in true cross-platform development fashion (see wyoGuide).
But may we throw stones at the commercial vendors when we, the OpenSource community don't do better. Beside Mozilla and to some extend OpenOffice there isn't many true cross-platform application either. Please don't say an application is cross-platform when it builds or runs, it's only cross-platform when it's also used. That means when an application is sellable or is able to get above 10% market share.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
IIRC, Corel Linux is the "most incompatible" Linux ever, in the sense that you can't simply get a tarball or an RPM of a package and install it your own. You are dependent on Corel's package offering. This implies that Corel needs to repackage all supported packages, which is a lot and consequently having very very high development expenses. Needless to say, I think this decision made Corel goes down. I think it may serve as a lesson to other companies who want to "embrace and extend" Linux.
Corel did stop on the half way. If the had partnered with some other companies (big software producers, hardware vendors...) they could have succeeded. Or if the put work and money to an existing distributions and projects like WINE.
...Corel dropping their Linux distro also improved the average quality of Linux distros! Everybody wins.
You're right about Xandros' success and Corel Linux was good, too. But Good doesn't mean it was a successful venture (i.e. profitable). In this case, Corel ended up discontinuing the software. Xandros took what Corel started and made it not only Good but Profitable.
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was asking papa why?
for there were there were many things I didn't know
and daddy always smiled and took me by the hand
saying someday, "you'll understand."
The ability to play tetris while it copied packages to disc during installation! That rocked. It was with X as well. In fact, Corel's install easibility was nothing to sneeze at.
In fact, I can't quite ascertain why they never really took off...even I didn't use that it that long. Perhaps Coral's variations from the main stream redhat / debian, etc. introduced more problems by branching away from the norm than solved them.
"Recursive bipartite matching"- try it!
...if they released Corel Draw for Linux.
Inkscape doesn't live up to the needs of the market. There is simply NO good vector drawing program for Linux. Meantime there's a great office package and lots of distributions. Corel can't hope to make much profit with such a competition, but pushing Corel Draw they would pretty much leave the others behind.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The moral of the story is that if your company has a Linux platform, Microsoft will pay you so much to drop it you'll be profitable. We see this to some extent here, where they have paid us to port some of our software from non-MS platforms to MS ones; adding up to a significant percentage of our revenue last year.
Yep! :blush:
I fail to understand why a company such as Corel carries on plugging away at it when it would seem (to me at least) to be far more sensible just to sell its remaining assets to someone else and close up shop. Is it just the brand that keeps them going? Who buys their products? I didn't even know they still existed.
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
With Free applications getting better and better the chance to sell word processors and graphics applications on the Linux platform is vanishing. Corel Draw and Word Perfect could have made a big difference years ago, but now they are irrelevant. Corel (and also Adobe) failed to acquire a profitable market. Now it's the time for audio applications, but I suppose ISVs will wakeup in a few years just to find out there is already some open source Cubase-killer.
Check out my cross-platform apps
If only CorelDraw, PhotoPaint, and Painter were available for Linux. CorelDraw is still my favourite vector package and I hate all of the ones available for Linux, especially because they're so gnome-ie. Xara might turn out good, though, even with the horrible GTK file dialogs.
And don't even get me started on the state and direction of GIMP these days.
The Farewell Tour II
i don't think linux had anything to do with corals loss of profitability or subsequent gain of it... coral have always produced substandard products, their linux distro included...
Corel's problem was that it lost pretty much all focus somewhere around the mid 1990's. Their strength was with CorelDraw, but by the mid 1990's they were trying to sell a mini Linux computer called the NetWinder (I remember playing with one of the developer units -- they were actually pretty slick little machines, which IMO weren't matched until Apple released the Mac mini), bought out WordPerfect, tried their hand at a pure Java Office Suite, and tried their hand at their own Linux distro. In effect, they had no sense of cohesion -- they seemed to be trying their hand at any crazy project that came around.
Linux wasn't the problem. Linux just happened to be one of the many things they played with during this time. At the same time, they let their original core business stagnate, allowing other competitors in the graphic software business to catch up and surpass them while they wasted resources on all of these other projects.
Part of the "problem" to my mind was Corel's original intent: to be Michael Cowpland own personal research labs ("Corel" == "Cowpland Research Lab"). From a technology standpoint I have to applaud them for the things they tried to do -- the Java Office suite wasn't as bad as many people made it out to be (the beta generally ran well on my OS/2 box at the time), and could have been a vehicle which could have (and I suspect did) push improvements in Java's areas of deficiency at the time. The NetWinder was a really slick and ultra-portable Linux computer that ran on an ARM processor (we had one of the development units at an ISP I worked at in the mid 90's that we were thinking of selling as co-located servers; sound familiar?). Their Linux distro was decent and capable. But in the end they spread themselves too far, and couldn't really find (or build) markets for these products. Their core business got chewed up by the likes of Adobe, Microsoft already had a lock on the Office and OS segments, and in the end only hobbiests were interested in an ARM-based Linux computer that had limited natively compiled software available for it (you often had to build the software you wanted to run that wasn't included with the system yourself, at least in the early days -- great for hobbiests and techies, but not exactly a recipe for mass-market appeal. However, I am still of the opinion that the NetWinders failure was really that the concept was ahead of its time). And a Java-based Office suite didn't interest much of anyone from a commercial perspective (although many of the parties involved in the push towards thin clients were very interested in the outcome of code of this sort, and I personally think that it's only a matter of time, although in the end AJAX may be a better solution than Java (ref: Google Spreadsheets)).
Linux just happened to be one of Corel's targets. I don't think Linux itself had anything to do with Corel's problems -- it just happened to be one of the things that distracted them from their core business, and never did in any way that earned them any real market distinctions. Corel's problem was a lack of focus and spreading themselves way too thin while virtually ignoring what made their mark on the industry in the first place, allowing their competition to surpass them.
Yaz.
For the last time 'It's Corel GNU/LInux' ... read the box.
People needs to realize that Linux zealots are really dangerous, whenever a company tries to release something for linux they cry out loud "where's the source?", "but the OS project X already (tries to) do that", "it isn't free (as in beer and speech)" etc... so instead of just judging the product by its qualities against the other products available in Linux they judge them by other ideas, get bad reviews and the company doesn't find a reason to release a new improved version because they don't get the revenue that could justify keeping that product line.
Go zealots, go!
You will be able to make sure that no company is interested to port their programs to Linux and so the people won't find in Linux the programs that really do (and don't pretend) the things that they need, so they will keep on using their current OS.
CorelDraw was excellent. It is the reason that our school's computer lab switched to Windows 3.0. Prior to that, all the programs we needed would run just fine in DOS, even the graphical ones like Pagemaker and Autocad. WordPerfect was the word processor of choice.
WordPerfect's first version for Windows was really bad. I heard that Microsoft gave them wrong information and that messed them up because they developed for NT and not 3.1. They also had the problem that their function keys were different than those of other Windows apps. For instance 'Help' was F3. Novell bought WordPerfect and then sold it to Corel. That brought Corel into direct competition and conflict with Microsoft. They should have known better. There was lots of evidence that Microsoft was using underhanded methods to kill their competitors and buying WordPerfect was like painting a big target on their chest.
I can't prove that going into Linux was an attempt to challenge Microsoft on its home turf but that's what it looked like to me. It looks like an astounding case of hubris.
I guess Microsoft could've helped the bottom line by killing off the Xbox division. That thing was leaking money like a sieve.
Corel either wanted the magic pixie dust of Free software to automagically fix their dumbass business model or they were looking to get some blackmail money from Microsoft. They got the money and dump Linux like a hot potato.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
take off IIRC is that it's patented. Can't remember the details.
This is a great example of how corporations do better when they stay focused on their core strengths. There are many reasons why Adobe does so well vs. Corel, the primary one being quality. Adobe builds great products because they are focused. Adobe never tried getting into the OS business; it is completely unrelated to their area of expertise. A viable business cannot be everything to everybody and should be very careful when expanding their product line. My company builds collaboration software. That's it, nothing else. It will be a long time before we think of building anything else.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/02/220238
I didn't rtfm, but was Laura Dildo mentioned in it?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I was one of the unfortunate soles we purchased a copy of Corel office for Linux, and it was absolutely unusable. It would typically run for maybe 15 minutes before crashing, sometimes completely locking up the system. Clearly, it was a great example of where the marketers were way ahead of the programmers, and as a result a poorly integrated version of Corel Office for windows bolted to WINE was released that was at best software in the alpha stage.
One the flip side, Corel Wordperfect for Unix actually worked pretty well...I think I still have a copy of it laying around somewhere. Of course, with the availability of Openoffice 2.0, it's hard to imagine any future release of Corel office for Linux garnering any support from the user community at all.
And don't forget that Corel also dropped all its Mac support at around the time it dropped its Linux support.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
"However, if you had an innovative app, one that scratched an itch that wasn't already being scratched by multiple other apps, then Linux would be a valid market for a desktop app, IMO."
Would those be Kapps, or Gapps?
Amen,
Before anyone cites Corel's failure to turn a profit, they should realize that a successful business requires more than a great product. You need sound business decisions and great sales/marketing. Of course if you haven't got any of these, you just need a Microsoft buyout.
Corel Linux, from what I've learned from ex-Corel employees here, was just a last gasp.
The product was poor however. I worked with a fair number of ex-Corel employees here in Ottawa and it was just my luck that I was working with them when Corel Linux came out (note the sarcasm). I was forced to install this abomination on ten workstations and keep them running. What a drag that was. In fact, working with ex-Corel employees alone was a drag since they were laid off when Corel Linux failed to take off. Paradox anyone?
Thank you, Michael Copeland for giving me one year of your hell.
Corel still exists? Have they produced anything since Corel Draw for Windows 3.11?
That's one company that is going nowhere at record speed!
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Wow, I guess nobody remembers all that went down back then. I suppose it *WAS* a few years ago. I have boxed retail versions of all of these sitting here:
/etc/printcap file's properties, it didn't play nice with window managers (in particular, KDE's kwin, where you couldn't get windows to take focus properly). It wasn't compatible with the way most distributions had configured XFree86 because it tried to install its own proprietary TrueType font server, which fought with xfs for the same port and didn't simply try to set and add to the fontpath a new port. The launch scripts it used were poorly constructed and required hand-editing on many systems to get them to work right. The installer itself didn't work on a percentage of Linux systems.
/etc/printcap, install update, edit X font settings) were frustrated because so much of the press around the product was *horrible* because it simply didn't work as advertised *yet* and it was clear that if they'd just waited and continued development until it was stable, they'd have beaten the rest of the market to a growing Linux customer base and at the same time made available a desperately needed product.
- CorelDRAW 9 and PhotoPaint 9 for Linux
- WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux ("Deluxe" version came with Paradox for Linux)
- WordPerfect 8.0 for Linux
- Corel Linux (several versions)
This was ~6-7 years ago now. There were no real top-quality application suites for Linux at the time. Linux had been riding the "dot com bubble" wave, but it had meant lots of investment in the OS and distros, not nearly enough in applications. The buzz was that all Linux needed was a good set of applications to grab a big chunk of OS market share, and amongst the Linux user base, there was a lot of drool for a good set of applications that would "finally" let people get all of their work done on Linux.
There was no OpenOffice yet, GIMP was far behind where it is today, and the body of KDE and GNOME applications was much smaller.
Corel had announced that they were working on Linux versions of their major applications suites and abandoning the beta Java-based versions of the major suites that had been floating around (yes I downloaded and tried WordPerfect Office for Java, it did exist). Reviewers were waiting for copies and the Linux news sites were watching with excitement for the first "big name" consumer applications to come to Linux. WordPerfect 8 for Linux, a native X application, was already available as a free download for the personal version and was driving interest for the "modern" versions of the complete suite and for the CorelDRAW suite as well.
Corel could have done very well and beaten everyone else to the game in the Linux market.
Instead, they released bad software. WordPerfect 2000 for Linux came out first and was, to put it simply, so frustratingly close to a usable product that it pissed you off. The box (I have it here) says that it is "Compatible with every major Linux distribution." I ran it under Red Hat. You could see the "full fledged powerful big-name office suite" everywhere in the product--it looked and worked just like the Windows version--except it didn't work. It was crash-happy, didn't integrate with anything except one version of LPRng and a very narrow subset of the
Corel released one update which solved some of these problems, but the initial buzz was horrible--probably 80% of the buyers, who were dot-com-bubble-era Linux converts ("the next big thing" newbies), couldn't get it to run right and the solutions were often second best (here's how to edit your X configuration... here's a text-mode installer for you instead... here's how to edit the launcher script so that it doesn't crash on launch). Those of us who did know enough to get it running (fix
Once you got it running correctly, it was near-excellent, but with showstoppers. I wrote two books and and a pile of papers with WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and used the MS Office import/export filters he
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
As a former Corel investor, this whole thing is bullshit. Corel dropped Linux and still wasn't anywhere near profitable for years afterwards.
Corel Linux was a symptom of a problem a lot of companies faced that time, that a buzzword compliant release of a product few wanted or needed was a great way to get attention on Wall Street.
Corel's problems go all the way back to 1996, when they bought the word processor that Novell had been running into the ground. Has anyone ever used the last Novell WordPerfect for Windows? It's not a pretty sight. The only value left in WordPerfect was the name, and Novell had already done major damage to it. It took Corel years to have anything resembling a usable Office-competitor.
Things got so bad that Microsoft had to pour millions into them to keep them afloat for the sake of avoiding anti-trust.
When Burney came on board, he pissed away so much money on marketing, it's only by the grace of the quality of their developers that the company survived at all. They made a few nice acquisitions to their imaging portfolio, but then came up with crap like Deepwhite. Their marketing department was dreadful. Does anyone else remember the controversy when the box art for one of their major imaging programs... a program that's supposed to be designed for advertising companies for Godssake, had emblazoned on it that the box art was made using Adobe Illustrator?
The rescue of the company came when they started getting smart and selling a trimmed down WP suite to OEM makers to pack-in with their new systems. Their imaging software was starting to recover a little from the Adobe fiasco. Then Vector Capital came along and snapped up the company at an almost insultingly low price.
Yes, mod me off-topic but I'm desperate. I've been given a Corel Draw Document (.cdr) as cover art for (charity) music CD. The duplication shop has a Mac-only, Adobe art department. They accept:
Applications we accept: (Must be MAC compatible)
Illustrator CS2
Photoshop CS2
Quark 6.1
InDesign CS2
How do I get the artwork into an acceptable format as inexpensively as possible? (I don't own Illustrator or Corel Draw)?
TIA
Be heard || Be herd
While my stance is more moderate than yours, I think you do have a point. I wouldn't label the users in question "Linux zealots" --perhaps Linux "enthusiasts"? In any case, the point is that if you want people to develop for the Linux platform, the developers need to be assured of some Return On Investment --but "Linux zealots" are not to blame for the lack of this.
I agree that, with the adequate-to-good quality Zero Cost Software (0$S --that first character is a zero) often distributed with Linux, there has come to be an expectation that all software on open-source software operating systems will be zero-cost (or "OSS OS's = 0$S").
In a sense, this is not that different from proprietary operating systems like MS Windows, where presumably Some Guy who buys a computer that comes with MS Windows would expect to pirate MS Word from his neighbour. Commonly used software is 0$S for the home user, too.
The difference is that, in addition to the ubiquitous pirated software, MS Windows also enjoys a legitimate and money-making market in the business world, where corporations really do pay money for MS Office or PhotoShop. Based on this, the software can also be sold in boxed sets at your local computer store: flashy bulky boxes labeled "PhotoShop v99.9!" that contain just a CD-ROM and filler. But the home consumer is not where most of their money is made; it's just a sideline --call it low-cost advertising, if you will.
Competing against this are two types of software from the OSS world: traditional proprietary-license type software written for the OSS platform like Linux, and software that's OSS itself.
OSS-licensed software can't make money from the sale itself, and needs some other sort of income scheme, such as selling the support service, or contracting with Big Corp to write/modify the software. For both of these, you have to work for your money: to earn twice as much, you have to work twice as much --take twice the number of support calls, or write twice the software. If you stop supporting, or writing, your income dries up.
Compare this with proprietary-license software, which makes effortless money once you've made the up-front investment of creating the software. As more people buy the software --a mere click on your webpage or a cheque from some small business-- money automatically comes to you. To earn twice as much, you *don't* need to work twice as much, and if you stop working, money *still* comes to you! You could be earning money while vacationing, or sleeping, or studying to enter law school or something.
Is it any wonder that the starry-eyed developer would much rather sell proprietary software than OSS? But even if we consider proprietary software on OSS platforms, we have another unrelated problem: compared to the MS Windows platform, the market for other platforms is puny. Let's put any Linux bias on hold as we ask: would you rather sell your software to the MS Windows market or the MacOS market?
The smart folk here will answer: "Both!" It turns out that this is one potential answer to getting Linux market share. The sibling post, snarkily disagreeing with the parent post with the sarcastic reference to how Unreal Tournament for Linux has dealt Epic Games a death blow (not!), actually illustrates this point: they aim for the big market (MS Windows) and make low-cost forays into the side markets. Cross-platform programming is something I'm pinning my hopes on for boosting the quality of Linux apps.
One other way I can think of to boost developers' Return On Investment is to have a reliable micropayment system, where people can effortlessly pay $0.75 for OSS. Unfortunately, we don't yet have a good system since PayPal sucks. But micropayments would extend the market reach enough to spur significant software development, especially if you can multiply that market by making the software cross-platform.
That's why I'm heartened to hear that KDE will be coming out for MS Windows as we
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I've been given a Corel Draw Document (.cdr) as cover art for (charity) music CD... They accept... Illustrator...
I don't know the first thing about any of this, but I do know that Illustrator files end in ".ai", so I googled thusly:
Converting
The first hit I got was to this discussion from about three months ago:
Convert CDR to AI or EPS
It sounds like Corel Draw can export to either AI or EPS, so I'd say you would want to call up the people who burned the original CDR file, and ask them, "Could you please open the file, and choose either 'File | Save As... | Adobe Illustrator (AI)' or 'File | Save As... | Encapsulated PostScript (PS)'? And then either mail me the file on a CD-ROM, or upload the file to a site like RapidShare, and then email me a link to the uploaded file so that I can then download it? Thanks!"
If they have broadband, and if they upload to RapidShare, then the whole experience shouldn't take much more than ten minutes. If they burn the file to a CD-ROM and snail-mail it to you, then it could take the better part of a week [or more].
I've been given a Corel Draw Document (.cdr) as cover art for (charity) music CD... They accept... Illustrator...
I don't know the first thing about any of this, but I do know that Illustrator files end in ".ai", so I googled thusly:
Converting
The first hit I got was to this discussion from about three months ago:
Convert CDR to AI or EPS
It sounds like Corel Draw can export to either AI or EPS, so I'd say that you would want to call up the people who burned the original CDR file, and ask them, "Could you please open the file, and choose either 'File | Save As... | Adobe Illustrator (AI)' or 'File | Save As... | Encapsulated PostScript (EPS)'? And then either mail me the file on a CD-ROM, or upload the file to a site like RapidShare, and then email me a link to the uploaded file so that I can download it? Thanks!"
If they have broadband, and if they upload to RapidShare, then the whole experience shouldn't take much more than about ten minutes. If they burn the file to a CD-ROM and snail-mail it to you, then it could take the better part of a week [or more].
I don't recall anybody complaining when Corel released WP for Linux, that the sourcecode was not available.
Of course, it would have been better for the users if it had been, but Corel makes its money from closed source software.
The real reason Corel dropped its Linux ports was the fact that Microsoft invested a large sum in the company, as noted in other posts above.
First, none of us are anti-Microsoft. We are just like all the other investors that don't want the company we choose to make ill decisions to fellow companies that we also may invest upon. I have a diversified stock portfolio spanning to every computer software and hardware services company through the industry, and it pains me when one company merges into another at the bereft of their value or piddles their bid into another to cause unfounded controversey to simulate disorder when none exists. You obviously have no experience in bodies-corporate (Law of Nations) be mis-used. For one corporation to utilize another isn't a matter of express contract; it is not written: nearly extra-contractual. I own Microsoft stock options and ther is evidence that every company Microsoft buys into will soon issue fraud and false-controversey to disrupt even the competitors that I also own stock. I didn't invest for their legal a/de/com-partment to exercise the entire resources for excessive software audits to exaust developers into compliance. It damn-well is known as "inductance", because the officers aren't touching any of the fraud directly. Not all controlling-interests are above 50%. Just get those lazy bastards back to work.
/hater/ with /suitor/ and get a grip on Trust law and Contract law held in Uniform Commercial Code. Everyone that invested in Microsoft is finding non-satisfaction in the movement of the company by its officers interested more in jazzy appearance than technical orientation for progress. That's breach of contract, if one enters the premise with satisfaction equate to the economy having its "monetized debt" accumulate into the control of Microsoft. Was anyone satisfied with the merger of Bungie to Microsoft? Again, I held stock in Bungie, and wasn't satisfied to the performance of Trust to not diminish the value of my stock. That's the founding revelation of Trust law; puting property into the ministry of another, after giving them oath and bonding them for the value of the property, to be trustee on your behalf for beneficiary. Given that UNITED STATES intends its people to be neither grantor or beneficiary in their side of the monetised-debt market, there isn't much ability to protest another's mismanagement other then them to leave office before their bond is prized to whomever they offended. I see none of this chivalry in Microsoft. They just enter office and beligerantly tresspass on the interests of another for the original cause in the vesture.
(And even "threatened to sue" is a wonderfully vague phrase in the mouths of a hater like you; I can't find any references to tell me what really happened, but it could mean anything from "announced a lawsuit" to "observed in passing that Corel technology might possibly infringe a Microsoft patent".)
substitute
Just out of curiosity, and I'm not sure you can answer this, but how do you think Xandros compares to other Linux distros? Not in terms of a feature list, I can get that from Wikipedia, but how does it feel to use?
I've been toying with the idea of using Xandros for a while, because I kept getting annoyed with the rough edges of some of the free distros, and I wanted something that was more polished. (Actually, a lot of the complaints that I had with the distro I was using -- Kubuntu Breezy -- disappeared with the upgrade to Dapper.)
Guess I'm just looking for a 'holistic' comparison as to how it's different to use versus other OSes, Linux and otherwise, from someone who uses it as a primary desktop.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I have a way Corel could make money. They could take the last fast, all-assembly version of Word Perfect, 5.1, and sell it for anywhere from $40 to $200. It was re-compiled for SCO unix, and in fact that WP5.1 for SCO will run on linux if you have those compatibility modules loaded into the kernel, so it can't be that hard to re-compile for linux.
At $200 I could gaurantee two sales, possibly three. At $40 I could probably get a dozen, because I would be inclined to put it on every computer I own instead of just one for word processing.
It should not cost Corel much to do this. A couple of engineers should be able to produce and test the binaries in a week. The CD selling could be outsourced to some third party until volume justified more attention.
It sure is hard to feel sorry for a company that has great money-making products and doesn't bother to take your money. If I ever see Corel receiving any type of government handout, I will write to the appropriate officials about this.
It is a shame, Corel was one of the first word processor suites available for Linux. Unfortunately for Corel, their software just couldn't keep up against M$ office let alone on the Linux desktop for that matter. Most people would probably still use OpenOffice instead, as OpenOffice has much much better M$ office compatibility. Correct me if im wrong, but didn't Corel try to support the M$ .doc file, but was implemented terribly?
Still kinda sad though, considering they were one of the first.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
The fanboys don't want to accept the reality of the problems with desktop Linux, and so now it's some grand conspiracy involving Microsoft. The moonbats don't help desktop Linux, they just want to hide the problems and blame others.
Corel has no future. Corel is dead. Corel died when Micheal Cowpland resigned over that ridiculous insider trading fiasco. They haven't even been in the local news ever since, and people have all but forgotten Wordperfect and more importantly Corel Draw, two products that were the bread and butter of computer professionals in the 80's and 90's. Back then, MS Office was "the buggy one", the inflexible one.. well MS Office hasn't evolved all that much, certainly doesn't appeal to power users the way Wordperfect did. Corel Draw was a vector powerhouse with innovative features for its time, but they just kind of sat on it and let it rot, then sold off the smaller, interesting products to Metacreations so the company could "focus" on their "flagship products". So where are they now ? What did they do with all that focus ?
I clearly remember back when everyone was buzzing with Corel Linux gossip, a lot of us thought it actually had a chance in the marketplace. Linux on its own is useless, it's an operating system kernel; an engine. What good is an engine if it can't do any tangible work ? Corel Linux, on the other hand, was a complete system that included what was still the #2 office suite in the world - Wordperfect Suite, right up there nose to nose with MS Office 98 (which sucked donkey balls). Suddenly small and large businesses could adopt a Linux distro that catered to their needs, and most importantly had corporate support behind it. Ottawa is a government town, if Corel had played it cards right and converted some of the federal departments to Linux, at a time when desktops were still running Windows NT 4 (or even 3.51), they would have dealt a firm blow to Microsoft's canadian dominance, and possibly launched a series of ripple changes in the industry by lowering development costs and more importantly fostering tighter integration and security within corporate networks. Ask any mid-sized IT admin and the biggest cost in any server room isn't the hardware, it's the licensing. Give them a Linux they can actually present to THEIR boss with confidence and a massive name like Corel backing it, and you might actually get that P.O. approved.
Corel screwed up. They turned themselves into a sweatshop, and now they're just a blip on the radar. It's 8 years too late to do anything about it now.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
You have odd judgment. Facts from the article: Correl has had trouble for the last six years but Xandros had continually increasing revenue. A fact from observation is the absolute destruction of Word Perfect market share. If selling off your only growing product is sensible, you have no sense or live under a monopoly cloud that is going to extinguish you anyway.
Word Perfect taught me everything I need to know about non free software. It was technically superior but ultimately a waste of time. I'd have been much better off learning emacs instead of WP on DOS.
Watching the Correl remnants grovel before M$ is depressing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The tutorial in Debian is a series of local Inkscape drawing examples telling you exactly how to manipulate the tools. If you have not gotten that far, I'm not sure how you can think of yourself as qualified to judge the program.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm with you jasonditz!!!
...
/. zombies who still want to argue there's never a reason to see the coding of a document, please bark cluelessly after Bill, "I love to code HTML too without being able see codes too, because clueless WP people don't need to see codes!" -- arghh! ... BTW style sheets in WP with reveal codes work better than style sheets in Work and OO without reveal codes -- although admittedly the OO reveal codes window is coming along nicely, slowly, but nicely!)
After slowly destroying WP, by insulting their best programmers (forcing them to bend over or leave), while WP was outperforming the completely impotent "Word" (which but for the treadmill could _never_ have competed with WP), and taking a completely impotent payout from M$ from their civil case
(side rant -- while M$ simultaneously paid thousands of reviewer-zombies to bark in unison, "Who needs to see coding when laying out a document anyway? -- N.B. Bill once again stole "his" idea for style sheets from WP! (--for the
Novell has IMHO already begun to similarly destroy the SUSE (by the same method of insulting its best engineers), just as the SUSE was beginning to supplant the oligarchically controlled (e.g. alter-M$ controlled) RH.
Because Linux users aren't really used to paying anything north of $0 for their software.
You really think people who selected a free OS are then going to pay for a draw program?
I don't think the market is there yet. Perhaps if MS really bungles Vista and people run Linux for the features, things could change.
But right now, the Linux desktop market is mostly made up of cheapskates and people who don't pay for software because of principles. This hurts the profitability from selling applications to this market.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The funding from Microsoft that coincided with their decision didn't hurt either. They all at once gave up development of linux and started researching ways to use the new .Net framework all at the same time.
It sounds like it made good business sense even if there weren't outside monetary persuasion, but in reality there were more factors than just keeping their focus.
So it's a good thing, except when Microsoft does it. Fantastic. I'll keep that in mind.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I must disagree, in part. As a regular user of WordPerfect, and Quattro, (Excel alterative), for years, I still enjoy using it over MS Office, and I know that it remains popular, if not predominent, within the legal field, (lawyers offices, and such), because of it's "pleadings capabilities". For a Windows network, it is still a viable alternative, costing much less than MS's offerings.
And that does hurt profitability.
But the Windows market is bigger, so even after the piracy comes out, there are still higher sales.
Additionally, note that these pirates weren't going to pay for the software anyway. If they couldn't steal it, they'd almost always just do without.
But this doesn't contradict what I said, it backs it. The Linux market is similar to the windows pirats.. Most desktop linux customers wouldn't pay for apps no matter what, whether it's because they're cheapskates/broke or just constutionally opposed to paying for software (free/open source fans).
I do see a huge future for Linux in turnkey solutions, that means people actually paying for applications (typically through the nose).
You are obviously a huge fan of your own IT department. I dunno if you guys ever make mistakes, but I'll say a lot of other IT departments do. Just because you're making all the smart decisions doesn't mean the market moves that way.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Gnome and KDE already run on Mac OSX and I assume can be made to run on Windows without to much effort (not sure about the X to Win32 GUI migration though...). Anyway from the amount of people I've seen run KDE and Gnome on their Macs I can easily crush your hopes of a Bright Future(tm) as a result of this. Why? (I should add reason so I don't seem like a troll) It's simple...People will view KDE as nothing more than a new skinning program and the extent of those who use skinning programs are those who are bored with Windows already and you can safely bet that they have flirted with or are in the process of flirting with Linux. This is going after the wrong group of people; instead of finding a way to expose every day users all this will do is expose those who've already made their choice.
:) . I use Linux because it isn't Windows and that is why I use Gnome over KDE and while I do agree with you in part I completely disagree with the suggestion that Ubuntu should use KDE. In fact I rather like to see the other side: a new user comes across from Windows and sees Gnome and realises that Linux isn't about competing and that it is really about choice and that they are openly able to choose (via a simple apt-get line) to switch to KDE/XFCE/BlackBox.
Also Linux is not Windows. I dislike this whole out look suggesting that we have to beat Windows - Why can't we just have our nice OS that does what the FOSS community wants and just make sure it maintains a big enough percentage of the server/desktop market to be worth it - sure if we take over the world in the process all is good
I ate your fish.
The horrible, awful truth is that Corel has never really made much of a profit trying to aim graphics apps at the Windows market (recall that Corel was the lone "major" graphics app publisher to buck the trend and develop with its focus on Windows rather than the Mac). From what I recall, it took 110 million of Microsoft's money to keep the company afloat around the time that their Linux distro was being offered, and today Corel is more or less just a nice suit with an empty briefcase (Dr. Michael Cowpland, the Poor Man's Steve Jobs, is long gone and although a tyrant to work for was still a lesser genius according to the story), offering a buggy suite that is semi-affectionately called "shovelware"* by graphic arts professionals. Don't get me wrong...I've loved the flagship suite's user interface over Adobe and Macromedia's competing products, but you just won't get anywhere trying to market to folks in the creative biz with a Windows-only lineup.
You know where Corel's big industry presense is now? It's in the Quick Sign biz, where margins are razor-thin and shop owners grimmace at spending more than $50 on their vinyl-cutter design/driver suite. Corel is slowly devolving to become just another IMSI or Harvard Graphics; I fully expect CorelDraw Graphics Suite 14 will be most commonly had for $15 in the closeout bin at Circuit City.
Here's another former Corel property that is doing interesting stuff and filling a void in Linux that Corel didn't have the cajones to exploit (and providing yet another reason why my CorelDraw-Windows/Mac licenses will never get upgraded):
http://xaralx.org/
*Shovelware because Corel would shovel in all these very interesting (sometimes even industry-leading) features by the dump-truck-full in every CorelDraw/PhotoPaint release. Only about 66% of the astounding new features would actually work reliably under Windows.
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I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
--Groucho Marx
I do agree that many pirates wouldn't have paid anyway. That's why I mentioned them.
But there is another slice of pirates (esp. on pay-for platforms like Windows) that would buy the app but do not because they can pirate it.
I'm curious as to where you get the idea that most desktop Linux customers won't pay. I'm suspecting it is a personal guess. I have met very few desktop Linux users who refuse to pay for any software either due to financial reasons or being morally opposed to the idea. I'm sure there are some. But I would be surprised if they measure in the majority these days (note that the Free / Open Source concept has nothing to do with cost).
I would hazard a guess that a large portion of desktop Linux installations aren't even set up by the users. A large portion are enterprises (schools) who deploy Linux because they deploy thousands of installs and they save a lot by not having Windows, even at MS' cheap rates. They don't want to undo this by paying for the apps.
But I base most of my belief on seeing the behavior of college students (who I think make up the largest percentage of Linux desktop users, along with recent college grads). They don't pay for their music, they don't pay for movies or cable (some DVDs). They live on a limited budget and $20 spent on an album (let alone $50-$300 on a software package) is less they have to spend on other entertainments or even necessities.
Back when DVD drives were expensive and media too, it wasn't uncommon to see college students save up to blow $150 on a DVD burner and $4 a throw for media to "save" money by not buying movies or TV. It did turn out in the end, I'm sure, and it's easier to justify to oneself the purchase of hardware (since you cannot pirate it and you don't get tired of it as fast) than software.
College students and recent grads don't have a lot of money and have a lot of time. They'll spend a while finding and downloading content and programs because they don't have the money to spend. Now, if you think moms and pops are big desktop linux users, they are definitely more used to buying software and content, additionally they don't as often have time to burn to scare it up through underground (even marginally underground) channels.
So it really goes because I see Linux being bigger with a crowd that is already light on cash and used to copying things. No matter what you do, if you aim at that market, you'll have a bit more trouble selling software than to someone who has the money to buy it, the will to buy it and doesn't have the time to go find it elsewhere.
Call me crazy if you want. You could be right.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Who needs WP? At our site the admins just spent a few days removing ~500 copies from all our machines.
Meanhile as desktop Linux grows in market share (small but uuh it's growing and will not stop growing anytime soon) OpenOffice - the only real office suite for Linux - automatically grows in market along with it while Corel WP has nowhere to go but down.
My Inkscape files get pulled into Scribus (which does an outstanding job of inporting Inkscape files and rendering them as native Scribus vector objects; you can even edit the vectors). I can then assign colors to my original Inkscape objects. Neither app offers Pantone swatch libraries yet; you've got to create a spot color in Scribus and name it the same as your desired PMS spot (that's more for the pressman's convenience; the imagesetter could care less what name you give a spot color). Not an ideal solution I'll admit, but I do a lot of print work and for the past year since I switched to Linux this is how I've been handling things. On the plus side: Scribus' PDF export is world class. As a former imagesetter operator who has tried its output on several of my buddies still doing prepress, I can vouch that it's very, very good. And if you do publication work (i.e., newspapers or magazines), its PDF X/3 output is sterling. Again, this is perhaps a hurdle for folks trying to get away from CorelDraw or Illustrator on Linux, but I forced myself to find solutions and to me it's no more hassle than having to use CorelDraw or Illustrator to create a spot graphic or logo then import the resulting EPS files into Quark (which is how I mainly used CorelDraw).
Now, if you're doing duotones with Pantone colors, neither CorelDraw nor Inkscape is much use. I love CorelDraw and used it professionally from verion 5 up to 11 (when I then dumped Windows/Mac for Linux), but I've never been able to successfully get CorelDraw duotone output (where at least one color was a PMS spec) to go through an Adobe Postscript imagesetter. I've always had to go back and change, say, my PMS 193C and spec it as a magenta to get it to go, or import into Illustrator/Photoshop and fix it there.
The very, very latest Inkscape (0.44) supposedly offers color profiling and color management (through lcms) and (at last!) image clipping paths and masks. I just compiled it today so I unfortunately can't report to you on how well these new features work.
However, I can tell you that Inkscape can be used for print work, but it's really only useful currently when used in conjunction with Scribus. However, as a long-time CorelDraw and Windows/Mac guy, I can tell you that I've had plenty of nightmares over those 8 years when CorelDraw would happily create EPS/PDF files that were pure junk and that had to be fixed in Illustrator/Acrobat/other tools before they spit out a neg on the other side of that imagesetter that didn't have "LIMITCHECK"* written all over it.
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* For those who have never run an imagesetter, "limitcheck" is a very common error message printed instead of your desired output when you try to feed the imagesetter's Postscript Raster Image Processor some bad code in a graphics file.
* * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.--Groucho Marx
First, try opening the CorelDraw file directly in Illustrator. I know that some versions of Illustrator (9, for instance) will open old CorelDraw 5 through 8 files. You're probably not that lucky and it's probably in 9 or newer. In that case, you'll have to get the originating artist to export to Illustrator 7 format (which later versions of CorelDraw can do) or PDF format (Acrobat version 1.4 is better if color; 1.3 if black-and-white) or EPS format (Postscript Level 2 works swell for color or black-and-white; avoid Level 3 because Corel has "issues" with Adobe over what constitutes valid Level 3 code). Remember to tell the originating person to make sure all fonts are broken to outlines in the files he sends to you (fonts are the number one headache in file exchange cross-platform). I'd say PDF is probably the least problematic route, although your mileage may vary.
Good luck and remember: suicide is NOT an option.
* * * * *
A child of five would understand this...send someone to fetch a child of five!
--Groucho Marx
Novell's like the guy who buys a car, never gets any oil changes, never does any preventative maintainance, and leaves it buried under the snow all winter. It seems fine at first, but it doesn't take long before problems start mounting, they chalk it up as a lemon, and pass it off on some poor schmuck who goes "wow, it's nearly a new car, it should be in decent shape".
Quite true! To this day, Corel Draw has a niche following among commercial sign-makers, because it's a great tool for working with vinyl sign cutting machines. (The "CorelTrace" portion of CorelDraw is invaluable for translating a bitmapped image to vector format so it can be sent to a sign-cutter -- which works just like a plotter, but with a knife instead of a pen. Plus, there are 3rd. party drivers like "Sign Tools 3" that add native support to CorelDraw for hundreds of sign cutters.)
They really would have been best served to concentrate on sales of CorelDraw, instead of many of the other projects they chose to do. Especially now with the merger of Adobe and Macromedia, it looks like choices in graphics tools will become even more limited. (Most indications point to Adobe cancelling Macromedia's "Freehand" illustrating software.)
I don't think they've put out a Mac OS X version of CorelDraw in quite some time, despite having a pretty new WIndows edition. That would be a good place to start, with Macs being so popular with graphics professionals.
I think Corel was always looking for that "next big break" instead of accepting the idea that they could do well for themselves as a niche market player with a few useful, time-tested products. WordPerfect is still the word processor of choice for many folks in the legal field, despite the "general public" having switched to MS Word as a general rule. (Law firms tend to be heavy users of complex macros and templates - and they tend to have lots of custom stuff built for WordPerfect that they rely on daily.) It's these special groups of users of their "classic" products they need to start catering to.
I guess when you say "outperforming", you mean technically, not market-wise. WP lost in the marketplace long before Novell bought it.
The reality is that WP was fundamentally designed for those who prefer to peform commands through keystrokes. This was exactly the correct approach for the early to mid 80's when there were still armies of secretaries doing all the business typing. It was wrong, however, for later times when a larger share of executives had to do their own typing and hordes of non-professionals started using computers.
1) The time was too early for a Linux distribution or a Linux based application suite; remember that when this came out, it was around 2000; Linux had just started to gain traction outside the ISP realms in regards to server uses; they were too early to make any money off the product give the small amount of market there was to begin with.
2) The failure of Corel had nothing to do with Linux and more to do with the lack of any strong direction; yes, the Wordperfect buyout was a good purchase but at the same time, the idea of the Netwinder, Corel Wordperfect Suite for Java, coupled with some other terrible decisions, were the main thing that broke Corel.
Had Corel focused on its core market, possibly expand it using Wordperfect Suite; they wouldn't be hugely profitable, but at the same time, however, they would be making a modest return.
3) Had the money not been wasted on the above said ventures, Corel would have had enough cash in the bank, for example, to purchase Borland, and create an end to end company, from development tools, to graphics applications to office suites; marketing Delphi as an alternative RAD solution to Visual Basic (and C#), Wordperfect Suite as an alternative to Microsoft Office etc. the ability to leverage the fact that they could offer better complete packages for businesses.
Its too bad that the bad decisions of yesturday castrate the company today by way of not being able to make good acquisitions to expand their business beyond they niche they've carved out for themselves now.
Very well said.
I'd just like to reiterate again that I think that to their credit, many of these ideas Corel had held real promise. Their execution in terms of software technology was generally pretty good as well -- they weren't just cranking out junk code -- it held a certain quality of good design (from what I could see as an external observer). I just don't think their business execution was quite there. They didn't have a cohesive message for one. Microsoft was (and still is) about the Microsoft code stack. Symantec is about utilities. Adobe and Macromedia were about graphics and multimedia. Corel seemed to be trying to be too many things to too many people, without being able to somehow tie it all together (or if they did, they didn't do a good job of articulating that cohesion to the computing public at large). And for whatever reasons, they didn't seem to really be getting as much press as other major ccomputing companies. I think their marketing and PR were a bit off -- but maybe that's just my impression.
As to choices in graphic tools, there has been a lot of consolodation in this last year. Still, depending on what sort of graphics work you need to do there is still Maya, some of Apple's Pro tools, and some of Google's recent entries like Google SketchUp and Picasa, not to mention some of the excellent OSS programs like Gimp and Inkscape. Admittedly not all of these are ready for prime-time use in professional settings, and some of them are intended for special uses (most of Apple's Pro apps are more intended for film graphics than generting 2D printed output, for example), but it could mean that we are simply seeing a shift away from the old players, and that a lot of hungry companies are just waiting to bite at Adobe's heels (something that is somewhat easy to do at the moment, at least until Adobe finally gets its act in gear and releases some native Intel versions of their programs on OS X -- they're coverage of this important market is abysmal right now).
Yaz.
Corels near death - had nothing to do with Linux.
Corel Draw 10 was a disaster. There where lots of misfeatures and I could not even get through designing a single page of text without it crashing hard. Even that was forgivable. What was not forgivable was that Corels support boards were full of customers with problems similar to my own and Corel would not own up to the problem blaming it on "faulty graphics" drivers. I installed CorelDraw 10 on 3 different computers with three different video cards (two matrox, 1 nvidia) and had the same problem with Corel Draw and none of the other 10 or so applications I had on the systems. They finally admitted to some of the issues with the first service pack and by the second service pack the program was barely usable. I can stand a crappy product but I can not stand being lied to. So I like many others left Corel to die.
I remember working at Staples and buying Corel Linux Office Suite ... but here's the catch. ... I never actually used the software ... but I still have the Beanie Baby!)
It was on clearance for $5.00 and there was a kick-@ss Beanie Baby Tux inside the box!
(PS
Flash Player and Acrobat Reader are both (much too) common programs that run natively in Linux. Adobe in general has been fairly good about porting (at the least) their most common software. The JVM runs natively, allowing Linux to run pretty much any Java app. Apache and most other commercial-quality OSS apps (you mentioned Mozilla yourself) are cross-platform. Real Player is, AFAIK, the only commercial media player available for Linux, and runs natively. ATI's Catalyst video driver configuration program is ported to Linx, although it's unsupported and occasionally broken.
I would go so far as to say that maybe as much as half of the day-to-day software (sadly I must exclude most game titles from this) that runs natively on both Windows and Mac but isn't produced by MS or Apple will also run natively in Linux. Of course, it's a pretty small subset even without the 'day-to-day' limitation, and you can define that limit as you please, but there's a surprising amount of software that, if it's available to Macs from a 3rd party (quite arguably a niche market) it's also available for Linux.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The new Xandros 4.0 comes with its own version of "product activation". After installation, on the first-run wizard, users are asked to "activate" the product. To do this, they must go to the Xandros website, enter their serial number, then wait for an activation code to be sent from Xandros which they then punch in. Without this code, certain functionality within the product remains disabled (i.e. Xandros Networks). Because of the highly-customized nature of the code, Xandros Networks is critical to updating the system, using debian sources and apt-get is liable to break something easily.
Users can activate the product up to a certain number of times (I think it's 10) before they are denied activation codes and have to contact Xandros Support to prove they are not a pirate before being granted any more codes.
This past holiday weekend, the Xandros servers were down, meaning activation codes were not being accepted and users were not getting access to updates. Nobody was available at Xandros to contact or provide support.
Hard to compete with "vi" editor?
Corel had something like $80M in cash at the time the microsoftees took them out and into private pro-MS hands. It was an inside job and they managed to grab Corel's massive product portfolio for something like $30M total. Nice trick, and they got away with it scot-free.
However, I am not so sure this is where things are today or are going in the near future. I am seeing more and more IT professionals using Linux; even individuals I would never have suspected. And its not just the recent graduate crowd. Though, as these recent-grads enter the workforce, they are gaining access to expense accounts that would go towards tools they are familiar with and prefer. There's a reason you can pick up very expensive software at steep "student" discounts and it has nothing to do with immediate profits.
I agree with that. I do see a shift. I couldn't say how big it will be, or when it'll peak (or what's next), but I see a shift toward Linux, and that means more than just the hardcore (having no alternative due to price or doing it on principle) running it.
I tried to address that in my other post, talking about a shift toward people running Linux "for the features". I can't say as I described my meaning very well though. Right now, desktop users are largely running Linux for other reasons than the feature list it provides. They're doing it for the price, or some niche thing it does or perhaps for the configurability (although that is a feature, isn't it?). But if Windows begins (or continues, depending on your POV) to be perceived as having abandoned the user in favor of MS and big media's own interests or maybe they just can't beat this lack of security rap, then a lot more people will begin to run Linux because of what it can do for them. And once people aren't just running it for the price, you'll hit a big slice of people who are completely willing to pay a fair price for quality apps.
So I see the demographics of Linux shifting, we'll see over time how much things change.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If you want to get those extra programs without a subscription, just add the appropriate repositories to sources.list. The Xandros Networks GUI was even designed to help you do this so you don't have to edit the file manually.
The difference is: the programs available under subscription are supported. They could have included those programs in the Standard Edition, but then they'd lose money because support costs would have gone up.
IMO you really have no grounds for complaining.