Slashdot Mirror
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."
Yes. Corel did release their own distribution of Linux called Corel LinuxOS. Suffice to say it was not Corel's most successful venture.
This slashdot-related signature is a stub. You can help kihjin by expanding it.
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.
From the Wikipedia Article: He survived an investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission
:(
Uh, that depends how Wikipedia defines "survived". If it's defined as being reprimanded and fined (with his holding company, for only half a million dollars) for insider trading, then yes, I guess he did "survive" it. This slimebag's questionable trading right before the stock tanked caused Corel (and it's nice WordPerfect Suite) to be hampered for years. To quote the OSC:
Mr Cowpland is before the panel because of an egregious error in making a trade without disclosing knowledge of a material fact. [...] This panel however, is of the view that, had this conduct taken place after the amendments to the Ontario Securities Act in April 2003, [...] the sanctions ordered by this panel may have been much more severe.
[...]
[64] The respondents will pay $500,000 to the Investor Education Fund.
[65] Pursuant to section 127(1) (8) of the Act, Michael Cowpland is hereby prohibited from becoming or acting as a Director of a reporting issuer for two (2) years from the date hereof.
[66] M.C.J.C. Holdings Inc. [Cowpland's holding company which he sold his shares from] and Michael Cowpland are hereby reprimanded.
[67] Pursuant to Section 127(1)(2)(a) and (b) of the Act, M.C.J.C. Holdings Inc. is ordered to pay $75,000 to the Commission in respect of a portion of the Commission's costs with respect to this matter.
Time to insert another {{dubious}} into Wikipedia
They did release it (altough using Wine).
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4589
Check out my cross-platform apps
Sorry, wrong distribution.
Caldera Linux had tetris during install, but Corel Linux did not.
Well, first and foremost, some flipping documentation would be nice. When I go into the "Help" menu in Inkscape, I get a basic keyboard reference and some links to online tutorials. What I want is a reference that actually describes the options and tools available.
Okay, so here are some random features I use every day in CorelDraw that Inkscape appears not to provide:
I can't be bothered to look further, as it's already clear that it does not even come close to satisfying my requirements at this time.
Which is really not surprising, because Inkscape's own developers have made it perfectly clear that they are not interested in competing with CorelDraw and Illustrator. They are setting out to make the best SVG editor for Web graphics, not to compete in the commercial publishing world. I don't know why people are so desperate to make out that the program competes in markets it's not even intended for.
Replying to myself = bad, sure, but I think I must clarify what I meant when I said Inkscape does not support CMYK, before some fanboy tells me about the CMYK tab in the colour selection dialog box.
Try using that tab to specify the standard colour Pantone DE 321-3 C (C60 M90 Y100 K30). I can't. It keeps changing the values I've already input. This is, so far as I can tell, because Inkscape stores RGB internally and does not even attempt to support any other colour model; so when I input a CMYK value, it converts my input to RGB, then converts it back to CMYK to show me. Oops, it's not a clean round-trip conversion. So some perfectly standard colours are completely impossible to specify in Inkscape.
This alone makes Inkscape completely useless for anyone working for print rather than the screen. Equally, it's not a problem in the slightest for anyone working on web graphics, which is why it's not a problem with Inkscape at all, because Inkscape is aimed at the web market not the print market.
Xandros is the continuation of Corel Linux. The company was formed by the Corel Linux OS people who formed the company after Microsoft made Corel "an offer it can't refuse" and Corel shutdown its Linux operation. I had an rpm of Wordperfect 8 that came with Caldera Openlinux. It later installed fine on Red Hat and Mandrake after installing the libc5 libraries.
Corel is a Canadian company based in Ottawa and founded by Dr. Michael Cowpland back in 1985. He was a flamboyant combination of computer scientist and entrepreneur. The company became a great success in the late 80's with Corel draw but into the nineties it began to falter. It tried to expand its product base by buying Wordperfect. Cowpland then came to the view that way forward was to become the major Linux commercial software company. The Corel Linux distribution was developed and and WP and Corel Draw were ported to Linux. As I remember it they also developed the interesting Netwinder Linux based network appliance.
The company faced increasing financial problems, probably more part due to financial mismanagement than due to the Linux division. Michael Cowpland was forced out after MS made an offer to inject a large amount of money into the company. Corel dropped Linux and Cowpland was later charged with insider trading. I think in the end he made a large multimillion dollar settlement the largest in Canadian history for insider trading.
Xandros with the only successful spin off from its Linux division.