How are they planning to make money off this software? It seems like they just give all their apps away for linux for free, are they just trying to hurt M$s marketshare? Are they planning on charging money again once Microsoft goes away?
They aren't giving away everything, and they hope to make money on the stuff they are giving away by 'network affect.' Corel has a huge stable of Office/Graphics/DTP programs, most of which haven't been released for Linux yet. What they have given away:
Work done on WINE to help porting their programs.
Work done on KDE to offer a more comfortable environment to their existing users.
WordPerfect. The Word Processor, not the Office Suite. The Suite they charge for, whichever platform.
The downloadable distribution. They still charge, of course, for shrink wrapped distributions that include their commercial software.
Now, Photo-Paint. Which is a nice little gadget, but only a component of the commercial product they would like you to buy, CorelDraw. My bet is they intend it mainly as a convincer, to show everyone that they are making progress on CorelDraw for Linux, and that it will be worth buying.
Don't expect to see programs like Bryce, Catalyst, and Ventura to become freeware. Do look for them to be ported to Linux, and do look for Corel to start working out hardware partnerships and trying to convince businesses that use these programs to run them on Linux instead of Windows.
also, I'm a big fan of the windows version, but with this free, how do they make money? ppl (like me) will stop buying windows versions & switch over to linux..... or is that the point?
Yeah. Corel would love for everyone to go to Linux. They've already put lots of cash and man-hours into producing their own windows-alike linux distro and porting many of their commercial offerings to linux. It's their plan to put an end to the crap M$ has been able to pull on them in the past, by controlling the OS.
One question for anyone from Corel, when can we expect Ventura for Linux?:^)
Well I, for one, am running it in part because it works on multiple platforms. I may be on x86, but that does not mean that I don't care whether or not it runs on Alphas, PPCs, and SPARCs. Everything from GNU does and frankly I don't see why anyone should settle for less.
By the mention in the article that Indrema knows that Linux is under the GPL, and thus their derivitive works will also be GPL. I hope they make a few billion on this thing. Yeah, a few geeks will take advantage of the GPL to "steal" their game engine, and... produce more games for it? Somehow that doesn't sound like too much of a problem.
Hail Indrema! May they be the next Sony, and may their shareholders be infinitely happy...
Yes, but in order to use the DLL, don't you have to own a copy of Windows.
Umm... nope. Divx311alpha license agreement doesn't say jack about paying your M$ tax before you use it. They may have assumed that you would have to do so before you run it, but that assumption will do them no good in a court of law. Sorry, trollboy.
==>>Losing karma by the bucketfull by opposing this Micro$erf, what has happened to slashdot?
I don't believe this is quite true. If Office2000 was putting out TeX documents then any problems in translating them would be perfectly opaque. Programmer time could be allocated most effectively in that case, to real problem points, rather than to red-herrings.
Not that I like.doc format or anything but the principle of the.doc format is the same as any component object container.
Functionally, there probably isn't any real difference between a Tex file and and a compound doc file.
I really think this was my entire point. They both do the same thing. The only difference is that one (TeX) is an open format dating to the early 80s, while the other (.doc) is a proprietary format that changes every 2-3 years. They both do the same thing, so what possible justification could there be for using the second? Assuming, for a moment, that M$ is, as they claim, concerned with producing real benefits to their customers, I don't see any point to.doc. Do you? If so, please explain it.
Selling, using and advocating drug use is illegal and immoral.
According to you. The moral issue is entirely up to you, though I would love to see it defended if you feel up to it. As to illegal - assuming you live these united states, please cite precisely where in the Constitution we the people ceded to the federal government the right to determine precisely what we can and cannot legally ingest?
This is true. Pull in a TeX document which contains a figure which is in a format your 'puter doesn't understand, you'll see blank space. Same thing with a.doc file in the same situation, right?
Explain to me just how the proprietary.doc format is superior to the open TeX format then. This obviously is not it, because they both react the same to this situation.
No matter how many times you say that, it still is not true.
We're talking about embedding these custom objects inside a compound document.
Umm... doh! First off, in well over 99% of cases, we are not. Secondly, in those few cases where we are, this can be done in a standard format anyhow.
And why the hell should microsoft output LaTeX files? Microsoft Word is based on COM/OLE, why would they go backwards to LaTeX?
Hrmm, so "backwards" and "forwards" are completely dependent on time of introduction? So if I introduce a ridiculously complicated way of doing X and a much simpler and better supported way of doing X is already published, my way of doing X is necessarily a step "forward" by virtue of being later, right?
Or is this only true when I == Micro$haft?
You may say I have an axe to grind, if you do, it will be the first unambiguously true and correct statement you have made today. As I mentioned in another post, I've used Micro$haft products since well before 1990, when they at least felt a need to pretend to care what the user wanted, and I am bloody well pissed off at you these days. Yes, you have a right to tie your "innovations" (which I almost never have any need for anyhow) to your own products, and make them incompatible with the rest of the world, but it makes your product less - not more, attractive to me. And don't give me this bull-pucky about "moving forward" when what you are doing is moving back. I'm not an idiot, and I am sick of being treated like one.
Sure python is open, but how many users on all platforms will have a python engine that'll be compatable with any future KOffice implementation?
Any that don't can download one for free. If M$ truly gave a *&^% about open standards, they would include one by default, but even lacking that it is easy and free to correct their mistake.
Or what about xpaint? How many people will be pissed when they open their KWord document in Word for Windows and can't edit the image cause they don't have xpaint or an xbm compatible editor?
I am running win32 right now (I have linux on this machine as well, but at the moment I am in windows) and I have no difficulty viewing and editing X-window bitmaps (.xbms) with freely available tools without even rebooting. Try again, trollboy.
We are talking about comptiblility across platforms here right?
Yep. So what's your excuse for not following open protocols, microserf? I keep asking but you never reply.
I'm saying it's not that easy cause of the generalisation and extensibility of the DOC format.
Bzzzzt! Wrong! Try again, troll boy. If you and your employer cared one bit about generalisation and extensibility, M$ Word would be outputting TeX files. Come up with another excuse, before all the naive moderators that are trying to prove they aren't biased by moderating your posts up catch on to your game...
I don't want a word processor that spits out files that are readable only with extraordinary effort. I do want a word processor that will produce files in a standard format readable on any machine. The much maligned EMACS is in this respect far superior to MS-Word. I don't believe MS would have any problem putting out a far superior product, but they refuse. They would rather keep using an ever-changing format whose only "virtue" is that it is NOT readable to anyone on a different platform. This is "progress?" This is "innovation?"
It is not, but the only way to turn Microsofts admittedly great collective talent to doing things right is for the users of their software to send them a collective and loud message that we will not put up with this crap anymore.
Will this happen? I don't know. I'm not betting on it. I'm learning to use Linux. I'm about 90% there. Once I learn ITCL and figure out how to set up a linux box as a usable multimedia platform I'll be all the way there. Anyone want to help?
I haven't tried suicide either. You may think that means I am unqualified to comment on even the most obvious ramifications thereof. You are free to think that, I still say, it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Hrmm, nope, not on my 'puter it doesn't. Believe me, that's the first thing I try when I get a.doc file from someone I don't feel comfortable directing to resend the data in a standard format. It does work sometimes - other times I have to hit WvWare home page to get a readable translation.
Now, since it's obvious from your other post you are this weeks official M$ apologist, and since I am in fact a paying M$ customer (getting closer and closer every day to ending my 10 years as such) - explain this for me. If M$ truly cares about producing software which serves the customers needs instead of just creating lock-in, WHY do they continue with this ridiculous.doc format in all of it's endless change-it-just-enough-to-break-the-converters versions, instead of switching to an open format like TeX?
I remember when M$ at least felt a need to pretend to care about the needs of their customers - those days seem to be long gone now.
I think you are 100% right, and if I hadn't used up my last moderator point on a good post yesterday, I'd bump you a point myself. Not that your comment was particularly informative (no links to back up your point, shame shame) but it definitely qualifies as insightful. MSDoc format is an abomination, while it is a good thing there are in fact decent converters available (see WvWare) for those occasions when we just have to read a.doc file, but the goal should not be conversion of this disgusting format, but elimination of it in favour of open standards (text, TeX and html, depending on the document.)
... by at least one project, WvWare which has a very functional word to html converter available online, and the routines behind it are all open source.
The problems remaining are two - the.doc format keeps changing every release, and second, honestly, it sucks. Even converting it to a real format can be interpreted as giving it credence. I have used the link above in a couple of cases where it was really necessary, but generally, when I get sent a.doc document I reply please send me the data in a standard format. This usually gets the point across. It isn't like word can't output to rtf or txt formats, but for the rare occasion when you don't dare insist some PHB converts his data to a real format, this is a viable converter. And of course if you are writing a GPL Word Processor you are free to use the routines published here to create your own conversion filter...
There are also links on the page to all sorts of resources related to the ms word document format.
Good question. PDF has one advantage - it comes much closer to being an *exact* duplicate of the paper document, whereas HTML naturally involves some abstraction so far as layout and so forth. However I've never seen a case where that was relevant. Despite being forced to use.pdf documents over and over in business settings. I guess someone somewhere thought it would be a horrible thing if a line broke a different place in the electronic copy than the original or something.
At any rate, if preserving the original layout precisely is of critical importance, then I guess.pdf would make sense - otherwise I would definately go with the smaller and more portable html. Call me a geek, but 99% of the time when I want to reference a paper document, it's the information I care about, not the lovely and artistic layout. A utility to mount a tarball as a directory would be quite handy, that's a great idea, and should be almost trivial to do, no? Any hackers want to get on it?;^)
Absolutely not. In an earlier era many programs (early unixices and CPM for example) were distributed as source instead of or in addition to binaries, without even attempting to be Free Software. Those two examples were just as proprietary as MS-Windows and MacOS are today, but the source code was readily available to licensees. There are still cases like that today, Star Office comes to mind as a program you can get the source to but is not Free Software, I am sure we could all think of dozens and dozens of examples. Most people will obey the license agreement, and those that don't can and should be sued and ruined whenever detected. Civil society is impossible if the majority are dishonest, and it behooves a society to recognise that fact.
That said, one of my first examples probably explains why MS hates this idea and will fight tooth and nail against it - since the evidence indicates that they probably used the source code to CPM (which they held a license to at the time) to get MS-DOS 1.0 out in time to get that lucrative contract with IBM, and eventually kill off Digital Research, the creators of that code. Ah, the irony of it all.
Let me guess, you haven't actually tried OS X, but you feel qualified to make an educated guess that it totally sucks based on reading a description and looking at some pictures.
I didn't say it totally sucks. I said there are some UI decisions that are backwards. The traditional Mac window control layout, for instance, is unquestionably superior to the three-buttons-in-a-cluster approach found in Windows 95 - OS 10 copies Windows instead of the Mac layout, why? A screenshot is quite sufficient to spot this rather bizaare choice.
Several reviewers have noted some extremely poor design decisions, see for example Ars Technica's observation on the OS 10 dock, or Ask Tog, who while trying to be positive, properly notes several steps backward in the UI.
not part of, but the complete kernel of MacOS X is open source. The validness of the lincense has been discussed in great length and I haven't heard about any serious issues with the APSL 1.1
Maybe I haven't caught the discussions you have, but I'm perfectly capable of reading the APSL and it doesn't look very different from the SCSL to me. In particular clause 12.1.c should arch some eyebrows. At any rate, even if it qualifies as Open Source it's certainly not preferable to GNU or BSD licenses, and technology comparable to Darwin is available under either of those licenses. So why would anyone want to use Darwin instead?
since XFree has been ported to Darwin/MacOS X, you can actually choose whatever Window manager you want (some may need some porting too, but you do have the choice if you want)
Ok, so you can delete all the Mac specific stuff, and all the programs that rely on it, and replace it all with XFree and have... a bit less than you could get much more quickly and easily with your favorite Linux distro or *BSD. What's the point?
I don't think the original post was FUD at all, I happen to agree with the gist of what he was saying. I do consider your disagreements to be specious, for the reasons stated above.
The horrid interface decisions that have gone into Aqua IMOP render it a step back for Apple in terms of their traditional strength, good GUI design, but that goes in a different thread.
Most people here is saying that only the author can relicense a L/GPL software if he wants to (presuming he is the only contributor), is that really so?
Absolutely.
A new version of a software seems to me to be fit the 'perfect' definition of a derivative work. Most people increase the version number when they do a bugfix or increase the functionality. They don't rewrite the whole thing from groundup. SO it is a derived work. And since the original software was under GPL, wouldn't the new version of the software also have to be under the GPL because of the derivate clause?
Absolutely true, so long as the person doing the deriving is under the license. This is the point you seem to be be missing.
Say you write a program. It's yours. You can do anything you want with it. Other people can't. You want to let them use it. So you grant them a license stating that they can use it, and attaching whatever terms you feel necessary to that use. Forget about the GPL, this is the same with any license, so let's say you released it under a shareware license, which says you can use this program for 30 days, but after that you have to either send me $20 or delete it. Do you have to send yourself $20? Of course not. You, as the owner of the program, are not under the license.
Slashdot Mirror
They aren't giving away everything, and they hope to make money on the stuff they are giving away by 'network affect.' Corel has a huge stable of Office/Graphics/DTP programs, most of which haven't been released for Linux yet. What they have given away:
- Work done on WINE to help porting their programs.
- Work done on KDE to offer a more comfortable environment to their existing users.
- WordPerfect. The Word Processor, not the Office Suite. The Suite they charge for, whichever platform.
- The downloadable distribution. They still charge, of course, for shrink wrapped distributions that include their commercial software.
- Now, Photo-Paint. Which is a nice little gadget, but only a component of the commercial product they would like you to buy, CorelDraw. My bet is they intend it mainly as a convincer, to show everyone that they are making progress on CorelDraw for Linux, and that it will be worth buying.
Don't expect to see programs like Bryce, Catalyst, and Ventura to become freeware. Do look for them to be ported to Linux, and do look for Corel to start working out hardware partnerships and trying to convince businesses that use these programs to run them on Linux instead of Windows.Yeah. Corel would love for everyone to go to Linux. They've already put lots of cash and man-hours into producing their own windows-alike linux distro and porting many of their commercial offerings to linux. It's their plan to put an end to the crap M$ has been able to pull on them in the past, by controlling the OS.
One question for anyone from Corel, when can we expect Ventura for Linux? :^)
Well I, for one, am running it in part because it works on multiple platforms. I may be on x86, but that does not mean that I don't care whether or not it runs on Alphas, PPCs, and SPARCs. Everything from GNU does and frankly I don't see why anyone should settle for less.
By the mention in the article that Indrema knows that Linux is under the GPL, and thus their derivitive works will also be GPL. I hope they make a few billion on this thing. Yeah, a few geeks will take advantage of the GPL to "steal" their game engine, and... produce more games for it? Somehow that doesn't sound like too much of a problem.
Hail Indrema! May they be the next Sony, and may their shareholders be infinitely happy...
Umm... nope. Divx311alpha license agreement doesn't say jack about paying your M$ tax before you use it. They may have assumed that you would have to do so before you run it, but that assumption will do them no good in a court of law. Sorry, trollboy.
==>>Losing karma by the bucketfull by opposing this Micro$erf, what has happened to slashdot?
I don't believe this is quite true. If Office2000 was putting out TeX documents then any problems in translating them would be perfectly opaque. Programmer time could be allocated most effectively in that case, to real problem points, rather than to red-herrings.
I really think this was my entire point. They both do the same thing. The only difference is that one (TeX) is an open format dating to the early 80s, while the other (.doc) is a proprietary format that changes every 2-3 years. They both do the same thing, so what possible justification could there be for using the second? Assuming, for a moment, that M$ is, as they claim, concerned with producing real benefits to their customers, I don't see any point to .doc. Do you? If so, please explain it.
According to you. The moral issue is entirely up to you, though I would love to see it defended if you feel up to it. As to illegal - assuming you live these united states, please cite precisely where in the Constitution we the people ceded to the federal government the right to determine precisely what we can and cannot legally ingest?
This is true. Pull in a TeX document which contains a figure which is in a format your 'puter doesn't understand, you'll see blank space. Same thing with a .doc file in the same situation, right?
Explain to me just how the proprietary .doc format is superior to the open TeX format then. This obviously is not it, because they both react the same to this situation.
No matter how many times you say that, it still is not true.
Umm... doh! First off, in well over 99% of cases, we are not. Secondly, in those few cases where we are, this can be done in a standard format anyhow.
Hrmm, so "backwards" and "forwards" are completely dependent on time of introduction? So if I introduce a ridiculously complicated way of doing X and a much simpler and better supported way of doing X is already published, my way of doing X is necessarily a step "forward" by virtue of being later, right?
Or is this only true when I == Micro$haft?
You may say I have an axe to grind, if you do, it will be the first unambiguously true and correct statement you have made today. As I mentioned in another post, I've used Micro$haft products since well before 1990, when they at least felt a need to pretend to care what the user wanted, and I am bloody well pissed off at you these days. Yes, you have a right to tie your "innovations" (which I almost never have any need for anyhow) to your own products, and make them incompatible with the rest of the world, but it makes your product less - not more, attractive to me. And don't give me this bull-pucky about "moving forward" when what you are doing is moving back. I'm not an idiot, and I am sick of being treated like one.
Yes, unfortunately for you, trollboy, I do.
Any that don't can download one for free. If M$ truly gave a *&^% about open standards, they would include one by default, but even lacking that it is easy and free to correct their mistake.
I am running win32 right now (I have linux on this machine as well, but at the moment I am in windows) and I have no difficulty viewing and editing X-window bitmaps (.xbms) with freely available tools without even rebooting. Try again, trollboy.
Yep. So what's your excuse for not following open protocols, microserf? I keep asking but you never reply.
Bzzzzt! Wrong! Try again, troll boy. If you and your employer cared one bit about generalisation and extensibility, M$ Word would be outputting TeX files. Come up with another excuse, before all the naive moderators that are trying to prove they aren't biased by moderating your posts up catch on to your game...
I don't want a word processor that spits out files that are readable only with extraordinary effort. I do want a word processor that will produce files in a standard format readable on any machine. The much maligned EMACS is in this respect far superior to MS-Word. I don't believe MS would have any problem putting out a far superior product, but they refuse. They would rather keep using an ever-changing format whose only "virtue" is that it is NOT readable to anyone on a different platform. This is "progress?" This is "innovation?"
It is not, but the only way to turn Microsofts admittedly great collective talent to doing things right is for the users of their software to send them a collective and loud message that we will not put up with this crap anymore.
Will this happen? I don't know. I'm not betting on it. I'm learning to use Linux. I'm about 90% there. Once I learn ITCL and figure out how to set up a linux box as a usable multimedia platform I'll be all the way there. Anyone want to help?
I haven't tried suicide either. You may think that means I am unqualified to comment on even the most obvious ramifications thereof. You are free to think that, I still say, it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Your loss.
Hrmm, nope, not on my 'puter it doesn't. Believe me, that's the first thing I try when I get a .doc file from someone I don't feel comfortable directing to resend the data in a standard format. It does work sometimes - other times I have to hit WvWare home page to get a readable translation.
Now, since it's obvious from your other post you are this weeks official M$ apologist, and since I am in fact a paying M$ customer (getting closer and closer every day to ending my 10 years as such) - explain this for me. If M$ truly cares about producing software which serves the customers needs instead of just creating lock-in, WHY do they continue with this ridiculous .doc format in all of it's endless change-it-just-enough-to-break-the-converters versions, instead of switching to an open format like TeX?
I remember when M$ at least felt a need to pretend to care about the needs of their customers - those days seem to be long gone now.
I think you are 100% right, and if I hadn't used up my last moderator point on a good post yesterday, I'd bump you a point myself. Not that your comment was particularly informative (no links to back up your point, shame shame) but it definitely qualifies as insightful. MSDoc format is an abomination, while it is a good thing there are in fact decent converters available (see WvWare) for those occasions when we just have to read a .doc file, but the goal should not be conversion of this disgusting format, but elimination of it in favour of open standards (text, TeX and html, depending on the document.)
It's called TeX - check it out.
Try LinuxCAD . At $99.00 it's quite competitive with AutoCAD for Windows.
If you only do 2d work you can get off even cheaper with QCAD
... by at least one project, WvWare which has a very functional word to html converter available online, and the routines behind it are all open source.
The problems remaining are two - the .doc format keeps changing every release, and second, honestly, it sucks. Even converting it to a real format can be interpreted as giving it credence. I have used the link above in a couple of cases where it was really necessary, but generally, when I get sent a .doc document I reply please send me the data in a standard format. This usually gets the point across. It isn't like word can't output to rtf or txt formats, but for the rare occasion when you don't dare insist some PHB converts his data to a real format, this is a viable converter. And of course if you are writing a GPL Word Processor you are free to use the routines published here to create your own conversion filter...
There are also links on the page to all sorts of resources related to the ms word document format.
Good question. PDF has one advantage - it comes much closer to being an *exact* duplicate of the paper document, whereas HTML naturally involves some abstraction so far as layout and so forth. However I've never seen a case where that was relevant. Despite being forced to use .pdf documents over and over in business settings. I guess someone somewhere thought it would be a horrible thing if a line broke a different place in the electronic copy than the original or something.
At any rate, if preserving the original layout precisely is of critical importance, then I guess .pdf would make sense - otherwise I would definately go with the smaller and more portable html. Call me a geek, but 99% of the time when I want to reference a paper document, it's the information I care about, not the lovely and artistic layout. A utility to mount a tarball as a directory would be quite handy, that's a great idea, and should be almost trivial to do, no? Any hackers want to get on it? ;^)
Precisely. This is a deposition, not a trial. It is about discovery, not argumentation.
Absolutely not. In an earlier era many programs (early unixices and CPM for example) were distributed as source instead of or in addition to binaries, without even attempting to be Free Software. Those two examples were just as proprietary as MS-Windows and MacOS are today, but the source code was readily available to licensees. There are still cases like that today, Star Office comes to mind as a program you can get the source to but is not Free Software, I am sure we could all think of dozens and dozens of examples. Most people will obey the license agreement, and those that don't can and should be sued and ruined whenever detected. Civil society is impossible if the majority are dishonest, and it behooves a society to recognise that fact.
That said, one of my first examples probably explains why MS hates this idea and will fight tooth and nail against it - since the evidence indicates that they probably used the source code to CPM (which they held a license to at the time) to get MS-DOS 1.0 out in time to get that lucrative contract with IBM, and eventually kill off Digital Research, the creators of that code. Ah, the irony of it all.
I didn't say it totally sucks. I said there are some UI decisions that are backwards. The traditional Mac window control layout, for instance, is unquestionably superior to the three-buttons-in-a-cluster approach found in Windows 95 - OS 10 copies Windows instead of the Mac layout, why? A screenshot is quite sufficient to spot this rather bizaare choice.
Several reviewers have noted some extremely poor design decisions, see for example Ars Technica's observation on the OS 10 dock, or Ask Tog, who while trying to be positive, properly notes several steps backward in the UI.
Maybe I haven't caught the discussions you have, but I'm perfectly capable of reading the APSL and it doesn't look very different from the SCSL to me. In particular clause 12.1.c should arch some eyebrows. At any rate, even if it qualifies as Open Source it's certainly not preferable to GNU or BSD licenses, and technology comparable to Darwin is available under either of those licenses. So why would anyone want to use Darwin instead?
Ok, so you can delete all the Mac specific stuff, and all the programs that rely on it, and replace it all with XFree and have... a bit less than you could get much more quickly and easily with your favorite Linux distro or *BSD. What's the point?
I don't think the original post was FUD at all, I happen to agree with the gist of what he was saying. I do consider your disagreements to be specious, for the reasons stated above.
The horrid interface decisions that have gone into Aqua IMOP render it a step back for Apple in terms of their traditional strength, good GUI design, but that goes in a different thread.
Absolutely.
Absolutely true, so long as the person doing the deriving is under the license. This is the point you seem to be be missing.
Say you write a program. It's yours. You can do anything you want with it. Other people can't. You want to let them use it. So you grant them a license stating that they can use it, and attaching whatever terms you feel necessary to that use. Forget about the GPL, this is the same with any license, so let's say you released it under a shareware license, which says you can use this program for 30 days, but after that you have to either send me $20 or delete it. Do you have to send yourself $20? Of course not. You, as the owner of the program, are not under the license.