Corel Shuts Down Open Source Development Site

evil_one writes: "The end is finally here for Corel, who released a Debian based linux distro a couple years ago (now owned by Xandros) Has announced that they are shutting down their Open Source Development web site as of March 1st. As many readers already know, Corel has helped the community on a huge scale, providing the Linux world with versions of Corel Draw and Corel WordPerfect. It's sad to see this, especially with the amount of work that Corel has put into Wine and their other projects, which include add-ons to KDE." Guess I can retire this topic icon ;)

Was it because it wasn't profitable?

[forgoil]

Open source or not, working and then giving away your work will not give you money, and won't make a software company work...

it all because of Microsoft

[surflorida]

I'm sure this had nothing to do with the $135 million investment from Microsoft Corp, not.....

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-525751.html?legacy= zd nn

This shows one thing that we have seen before.

[Anonymous Coward]

This shows that open source as a concept needs to be refined. The success or failure of open source all depend on companies supporting it. Sure, the nerds will use it anyway but for wide-spread usage company support are vital. We will not see success if money can't be made, thats just the way it is.

I like the idea of having the source-code and beeing able to modify it, but maybe a compromise is needed anyway?

The Novelty is Over

[1nt3lx]

This seems to be the trend now that the novelty and excitement surrounding Linux has died out.

It is not a sound business model to develop apps and games for Linux for several reasons.

1: Linux doesn't control enough of the desktop market.

2: Most users of Linux apt-get (or the RedHat equivalent) their software. (eg: aren't going to pay for much)

3: It's difficult to develop for every distribution. Most commmercial software is made to run on RedHat. I use Debian. I'm SOL.

4: Those who use RedHat and consider buying software worry about products being discontinued, like this.

Same thing happened to Loki. They did a really good job porting games to Linux, but sales were pathetic.

I remember going into Electronics Boutique a year ago. They had a rack with the $50 Linux software right in front of the store. I went into the store last week all the software was gone. Was it sold? No. It was moved to the back of the store and marked down to $9. I bought Loki's release of Quake II for the tin it came in.

I wouldn't buy software when a semi-working version is available for free. Especially if I thought it would be discontinued.

Re:Open Source Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite true. People believe in the all or nothing money philosophy. What about the original darpa net, all that cable and those packet switches. written off as a loss etc. I'd say there was a great return on investment to the world in only a few years. don't look at the instant bottomline returns. Besides that is the open source and (ducking RMS flames) GNU philosophy, So Corel backs out. The work is not lost, it can continue, with very little ground lost. So my condolences to Corel's official decision, hope to see them again in the future. (and yes anything they did binary only is just another example of why we need to stick to the "source" guns)

Business Case

[frank249]

The paranoid might see a conspiracy as Microsoft now owns 25% of Corel but Corel CEO, Derek Burney, said recently that they are still looking at selling the Linux apps. Since their recent cash problems they have had a razor sharp focus on not offering products unless they can make a profit. Some have said that they should still offer them even if it was only a software download off their web site or CDs with pdf manuals. Burney said they are looking at that but then there are the support costs to consider. Copies of WordPerfect8 are still around and since it is native to Linux it still runs on all distros. WordPerfect 2000(L) is available for download on Morphious. It has the full suite but since it runs on WINE it can be a bit harder to install. I remember when I had it installed at work. A secretary who had never heard of Linux before sat down and started to use it with no problems since it was identical to the windows version. Corel was criticised at the time for trying to imitate windows and not being Linux enough but when it comes down to it you want something people can easily use if you want to get companies to switch over. I hope they can get back to selling it in the future.

Corel's mistake

[TRoLLaXeR]

Corels primary mistake was getting the idea to make a distribution at all. By the time they had that idea it didnt really matter wether or not it was any good, because there were Too Many Distributions anyway, of which most already _are_ fairly easy to use. At best the only thing another distribution would do was join the other hordes of minor distributions. Theres no money in that market, unless you have a coherent strategy other than "repackage-and-sell" (which several of the largest distribution vendors have), so they basically set themselves up to waste resources and fail (and further they managed to annoy a lot of people with semi-open licenses during testing, etc).

If they instead concentrated on making their applications work perfectly on linux (complete with easy installer for the large dists), and spent the extra energy on helping along other ease of use efforts that would be a good thing. Look at Ximian for an example.

Re:Open Source Theory

[ipfwadm]

What about the original darpa net

The one built by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency? Defense as in U.S. Department of Defense? Somehow I doubt the US government "wrote off" its expenses, considering it doesn't pay taxes to itself. And the government spends extraordinary amounts of money on countless research projects just like darpanet, expecting a return on investment on only a few of them. The government can do that. Corporations can't, unless there is a reasonable expectation for success. And judging by the number of failed/failing open source companies out there right now, why should there be any expectation for success in that field?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:No, you can't retire that icon just yet.

[FreeUser]

I know you're kidding, but Corel is still doing interesting things in the Unix community that the Slashdot crowd will probably be very interested in, particularly the port of .NET to FreeBSD [com.com], which is a very big deal.

If Corel has jumped on the .NET bandwagon, it, like Gnome, can IMHO indeed be written off, at least as far as the free software world is concerned.

As others have pointed out, the only way to win Microsoft's game is not to play ... and to offer a free, unencumbered alternative. You cannot do this if you are chasing standards Microsoft sets ... the target will move constantly (and deliberately, as the last 10 years of history has shown) and you will never catch up.

Corel blew it a long time ago ... I'm just glad I sold all those shares at $20.00 (and wish I'd sold 'em at $40.00).

Re:Open Source Theory

[VAXman]

My theory about open source is that Linux in particular is being privately funded by IBM, Sun, AOL and other big companies with the sole intention of breaking up Microsoft.

Why would IBM have any interest whatsoever in breaking up Microsoft? IBM needs for there to be a strong desktop presence in order to drive its core business (enterprise servers), and Microsoft does that better than anybody. I don't think IBM is particularly interested in entering the mass-consumer/business desktop software market. IBM even ships Microsoft software on their low-end server and desktop products.

Sun is dead. They'll go the way of DEC by the end of the decade. They picked up on Linux way too late.

AOL is probably the most direct competitor of the three, though it is hard to imagine how embracing Linux would help them gain any sort of advantage in the ISP market. AOL already comes pre-installed on practically every computer anyways. Again, AOL greatly benefits from a mass-produced, easy-to-use desktop. Would AOL be around if Microsoft (and Intel) hadn't created the commoditized PC? It's hard to imagine how.

Corel are bandwagon jumpers

[God! Awful]

Corel was a good company when they focused on graphics products, but for the last 9 years, they have jumped on every bandwagon they could find:

- they were going to compete with MS Office
- they were going to port all their apps to Java
- they were going to build a network computer
- they were going to port all their apps to Linux

The problem with jumping on a bandwagon is that eventually you have to jump back off. Interestingly enough, Corel has a reputation of laying off their experienced workers and replacing them with fresh meat. I think this is how they ensure that their employees remain motivated and indoctrinated with each succesive failure.

It is definitely possible that Cowpland was the problem and that Corel will make a comeback now that he's gone. They offered me a job many years ago. Thankfully, I had other offers.

-a

Re:I wish this wouldn't keep happening

[uchian]

That's great as long as the money's there, but now it seems these companies have bled all their cash away, leaving the community right where it was before.

...except from all the money that they pumped in of course.

The community only grows stronger when a business joins us. When a business leaves us, we _haven't_ lost anything, we have merely stopped gaining from them.

Corel has left, but the work that they put in remains and will be built upon. That is the crowning achievement of free software.

Wordperfect for linux isn't free software, and hence doesn't fall under the argument I just proposed :-)

Re:Huh?

[Znork]

Oh, yeah, a rosy future as, maybe, Microsofts 'token' competition. They're still bleeding money, and are only alive because it was worth Microsoft $135M to get them out of producing Linux software.

Corel has written some nice products, but the mass consumer productivity software industry is dead. On one hand you can sell to corporations and the only way you can do that is if your name is Microsoft, or on the other hand you can try selling to endusers, but they're either on the windows or mac platforms making (illegal) copies of MS Office and you'd have to pay them not to, or they're on Linux and have so many free alternatives that you'd again have to pay most of them to use something else. In the end, they could make the best products in the universe and it wont matter because there isnt anyone who will buy them.

So Corel knows this too, and are shifting away from their dead markets, and into 'technical illustrations', 'Enterprise Process Management' and 'XML Content Solutions. Well, for technical illustrations Corel is lowend, and unlikely to reach the profitable customers, and the other two fields are buzzword intensive fields with strong established players where they again arent exactly playing in corporate space.

I cant really imagine what rosy future you see for either consumers or Corel in this situation.

Re:No, you can't retire that icon just yet.

[rlowe69]

I think your view of .NET is a little clouded by the fact that Microsoft is involved. Sure Microsoft has demonstrated monopolistic practises, but when is the last time they released a standard to ECMA [www.ecma.ch] and then purposely broke it?

You cannot do this if you are chasing standards Microsoft sets.

The standards are now in ECMA's hands to maintain. Sure, Microsoft can change libraries they don't release to standards organizations, but I believe that the benefit of the .NET runtime will be seen in the open source community without those libraries anyway.

So write of GNOME (Ximian's Mono Project, to be more specific, GNOME hasn't decided to incorporate Mono yet) and .NET if you want to, but you're doing it at your own peril.

They priced themleves out of the market !!!

[Deep_Blue]

Plain and simple,Corel Office was way too expensive for most users to be an incentive to buy.A price of 80-100 CAD (50 - 70 US$ for those of you south of the border)would've give them the volume to make up in lower price.It's simply called not knowing the market you're trying to sell to.
As for Corel Linux...that deserves no real comments,a distro incompatible with it's parent or other distros (one huge kde package ) with an "all or nothing" installer (never fixed) and completely out of sync with the fast evolving Linux software (can we say here Debian unstable).
Plain and simple,bad management and expectations clouding the reallity.

Re:Open Source Theory

[dbmacg]

Isn't this a shortsighted view? We really have to be more adaptable to different models. The proprietary model is not required to make money. Other business models work as well. For example, generic products can be sold profitably. 'Bayer Aspirin' is sold profitably beside generic 'Aspirin' and ASA tablets. Also as an example, many people make money by using the English language well. They do not own it, but they teach it, they write it, they help people with it, they package it, they use it. And they profit from it. Also, Patents and copyrights run out, and then the intellectual property flows into the public domain. The way in which you make money changes, and models change too.

OS vs hardware

[Tony]

Sun doesn't give a damn about selling Solaris. They care about selling hardware; and they make fucking *great* hardware. If Linux ran as well on high-end hardware as Solaris, Sun would be... well, maybe not *happy* to get out of the OS business, but *willing.*

They don't make money off their OS. They make money off their hardware. Linux does not yet scale as well to multi-processor machines (that is, hardware with *dozens* of processors). When Linux *does* support this class of machine as nicely as Solaris, Sun will most likely offer Linux on the high-end, as well.

Re:Open Source Theory

[Kiwi]

And judging by the number of failed/failing open source companies out there right now, why should there be any expectation for success in that field?

Let's pretend we are in 1983. Someone may write the following:

And judging by the number of failed/failing video game companies out there right now, why should there be any expectation for success in that field?

For people not familiar with the history of video games, Atari was really big between 1980 and 1982. Then, in 1983, something happened: Too many video game companies were out there, and companies, in the false expectation of the market continuing its exponential growth, were spending more money than they were making. A familiar story to anyone who watched the .com madness.

Just like the .coms in 2001, the video game industry in 1983 had a big crash, resulting in an economic slump in the tech industry.

However, the Favicon NES came out in 1983/1984, and, with Super Mario Brothers, was able to make video games sucessful again. By 1987, the video game industry was thriving again, but this time with more reasonable expectations.

While a number of open source companies are no more (hello, Eazel), a large number of open-source companies are still alive and thriving (RedHat, in particular, is incredibly sucessful).

People thought video games were a dying fad in 1984, like the Rubic's cube and Espirt clothing. People think open source is a dying fad in 2002, like N'Sync and that special effect moving the perspecive while the action is frozen. Just as video games are alive and well today, open source will be alive and well in 20 years.

- Sam

100% incompatability

[Dr. Evil]

Creators of the Netwinder StrongArm linux machines.

Producers of a Debian sub-distribution. (which won't run on the Netwinder)

Creators of a full Office Suite. (which won't run on the Netwinder or their Linux distribution)

Not smart decisions.