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Corel

Corel Sells GraphicCorp Division 112

Posted by emmett from the selling-graphics-in-hull dept.
Zalgon 26 McGee writes: "Corel has announced the sale of their GraphicCorp division to Hemera, according to a report on CBC News Online. Is this just another step in Corel's death spiral? A way to hide assets from creditors? Or some of the bold leadership Corel needs to find their way again?" Weren't we asking the same questions last week?
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Corel Sells GraphicCorp Division More

Corel Sells GraphicCorp Division

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  • Problem is most of those companies are NOT Canadian-owned, and nobody has heard of the ones that are.
  • What fucking right do you have to call the people of Newfoundland rednecks?

    Ah, a Newfie.

    Where would you get your cod for your fancy fucking dinner parties without us?

    Québec has plenty of fishing waters.

    Thank you for your generous offer, but sorry, I'm a vegetarian.

    First American land discovered by Europeans?

    An island in the Bahamas, forgot which.

    Ah, you meant the thing about the Vikings? That is only a myth, it has never been proven. They could have gotten anywhere.

    Oldest city in North America?

    Depends on how you decide on dates of foundation. Presumably Mexico City, for cities not founded by europeans. Otherwise, Santo Domingo.

  • I'm not to interested in clip-art let alone some out of date 80's graphics. Of course the stock raised because Corel showed they could sell something absolutely useless.
    I know Corel has embraced Linux, but I'm still waiting for Adobe Photoshop.
  • That sounds illegal. IANAL, but I'm sure a bankruptcy court would see this as an attempt at hiding assets from creditors. As I understand it, that's illegal.
  • "Let them live in their igloos and talk with their funny accents. "

    Why, whatever are you talking aboot? :)
    Mmm, cold in here, better throw another log on the fire before I freeze... uh oh, there goes the AC from the generato^%*^&*^*&
  • OK let's try to get somewhat informed on the situation before spouting a pile of crap will you? The government doesn't run the CBC, it just funds it. It's called a "crown corporation"....owned by taxpayers but run completely separate from the government. It's not under government control at all. It's like PBS...you wouldn't call that socialist control would you?

    I'm no big fan of the CBC, I'd like to see it privatized or restructured, but it's definitely not the government mouthpiece you say it is.

  • You're confusing two aspects of wine: 1) the WINE Win32 API to compile code against and end up with a native binary and 2) an environment for running windows binaries under. The latter is a stopgap measure until companies start doing more of the former.

  • "...frequently use such statistics to advance their point of view,..."

    I here that 78% of all statistics are wrong ;)
  • First off, it's just plain silly trying to push a political agenda here on Slashdot. For you, or the orginal poster.

    Oh my, I just can't resist.... What do you suppose the statistical odds of a repeat offence following a death penalty being carried out? No, you can't quote any Stephen King books either. For what it's worth, there's probably already been a $100mil study looking into this very thing.
  • I just responded to your assertion that only Europeans could build cities.

    btw, YHBT

    You mean, I should care, right? Fuck no. I'm too busy seaching for these Cowboys Fringants songs on Gnutella.

  • It's like PBS...you wouldn't call that socialist control would you?

    The problem is that the poster is probably a believer of one of these "Libertarian" or "Objectivist" private totalitarianism minarchist religions that think that the government providing any service is evil, and that everything should be privatized. He'll probably say that PBS is just "a project in social engineering" or some other such unfounded, uninformed crap.


  • America is a continent, not a nation.

    Yes, hidden somewhere inbetween "North America" and "South America" is the secret and elusive mega-continent known only as "America"...
  • Unless I COMPLETELY missed something, Wordperfect for Linux uses libwine, not WINE. Wordperfect for Linux is NOT Wordperfect for Windows + WINE but an actual version of the Wordperfect codebase which has been targeted for Linux x86 and linked with libwine. Indeed, I believe you'll find it quite impossible to get Wordperfect for Linux to run on Windows, and if you run Wordperfect for Windows in Wine it'll behave differently than Wordperfect for Linux.
  • Weren't we asking the same questions last week?


    Don't we ask the same questions every week?

  • At least we're not filled to the brim with shotgun-toting inbreds. Lots of stupid people, yes.. but not many Anonymous Inbreds.

    Wow, guess Kyle's mom really was right.

    You can always tell when you've got a REALLY good Slashdot article when you get the bigots and zealots identifying themselves. Hey, got some hardcore socialists into the mix too. Now this is the good stuff!

  • "If Corel weren't involved in linux..." That's exactly right. But they are involved with Linux.

    So your point seems to be that with Cowpland in charge, we can't trust that they will continue to support Linux. Based on what? "First WordPerfect..." - excuse me - still WordPerfect. Java? Gee, they made a valient effort to support a fledgling technology, but failed to fall victim to the Concord fallacy when the technology failed to live up to its promises.

    Talk is cheap. Meanwhile, Corel is out on a limb, trying to make a go of it. I really wish the backseat drivers among us would stop jeering and throwing fruit, and instead suggest what they would do differently.

  • Corel has developed and sold off product lines several times in the past (Netwinder, GraphOn, etc.), so we can at least hope that this is not out of desperation. You may notice that Corel has retained a permanent license to use the photo collection in their products, and gained an equity stake in Hemera. If Hemera is better at making a profit than Corel is at present, this could add to their bottom line.
  • When I was at the LinuxWorld Expo in New York, the Sun reps were very proud to point out how Sun was planning to re-write StarOffice in Java and enable StarOffice components to be embedded in other applications. I'll be a believer when I see it, but this could lead to smaller, tighter apps based on StarOffice with much less bloat.

    I haven't heard much about that since, but if it pans out, StarOffice could become like Mozilla. Again, I'm waiting for Mozilla to improve, but I'm confident that when it is finished there will be both full-featured and no-frills adaptations to satisfy most users. The real danger for Corel is losing mindshare to the idea of a leaner StarOffice, as the promise of Mozilla has reduced interest in competing browser development projects.

  • What is wrong with you guys. My d^&k is bigger that yours attitude does not seem to be the best topic for /. Live and let live.
  • Idaho? That is a northwestern state, not midwestern. If its got anything resembling mountains, it isn't in the midwest.

    Unless you are figuring Katz is one of the coasters who gets Idaho confused with Iowa (which is in the midwest) and Ohio (which is a northeastern industrial state, not midwestern either).

  • First of all, you probably mean USian liberty. America is a continent, not a nation.

    Yeah, and 'US' is part of an acronym, not the name of a country.

    IIRC, the name of the country is The United States of America. This name makes it difficult to find a word meaning 'person of the country', but 'American' works better than 'United States of American' or your absurd 'USian'.

    Ah well, the predominate feature among flames is that they are not well thought out.

  • A quick point regarding the summary of this story. Selling an asset is not really a way to hide assets from creditors. You sell the asset, you receive something (in this case shares) in return. Certainly changing the asset but not hiding it. Worth being careful with these sort of throwaway comments when you are talking about solvency!

    Regards,

    Jason.
  • "America" as a continent came first than "America" (United States of America) as a country.

    So, if we are speaking about fairness, U.S. citizens should be differentiated from people from the continent, not the opposite.

    I am brazilian and also I don't like when U.S. citizens refer to themselves as 'Americans'. I am sorry, but they are NOT more American than me.

    We should call them americanians, americanees or something like that. But not (specifically) americans, it would be disrespectful with the rest of the continent.


    Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT
    IBM CATE
    SAIR GNU/Linux Certified

  • While I was never sure about the office java thing, I think it was just a rumor, but could have been true. The TV commericals promoting the "power of java" were refering to the ability of Wordperfect to use java, sort of in the same way that MS office uses VB. But WordPerfect was never written in java, and never will be.
  • Norton had a security product called Your Eyes Only which they sold last year, and abruptly stopped selling soon after it came out. The actual reason given on their web site is, interestingly, "unresolved Y2K issues." They must be some issues, I tell you, because I ran across a copy on the Web, tried to install it for shits and giggles, and it hung. Weird. I thought it may have been an issue with that particular copy, but then I ran across a page comparing various crypto apps, and the author said she couldn't review Norton YEO because, even though she dloaded the trial version, it hung during install. The version I had was the full version, so it couldn't just have been a kill date in the trial copy, it must have been doing something weird during the install routine based on the date, but I have no idea what. Norton YEO was kind of unique because, in addition to letting you encrypt files or folders on your drives, it had an option for encrypting the File Allocation Tables for all drives which would mean that there'd be no easy way for an attacker with physical access to get at any of your files unless they were someone with the ability to physically remove the drive and hook it into another machine for analysis and file recovery.

    Back to Corel, it is a pity that they're in such straits at the moment. WordPerfect is so much nicer than MS Word, and while I prefer Adobe's graphics products, Corel's are still pretty impressive. They even have one graphics app which Adobe can't best: KnockOut 1.5, which is absolutely the best and easiest way to separate a particular figure in an image from the rest of the image; no more pixel-by-pixel erasing of the borders left by Photoshop when it cuts out a figure, KnockOut has the most intelligent ways of doing masking and cut-outs for you. It would be a pity all around if Corel goes under, or gets bought out by one of its not-so-nice competitors (read: MS or Adobe).
  • Quattro, their other "advantage", runs excellently in native mode under Linux, but it's not Corel's any longer, since their merger with Borland/Inprise fell through.

    I don't follow. QuattroPro, nee Quattro, was born a Borland product long ago, but wasn't it sold to Novell and then to Corel as part of the WP Office? Quattro being in Corel's office suite didn't have to do with their failed engagement with Borprise.

    When quattro was born, the competition was 1-2-3, hence the name. How times change.

    This is the endgame for Corel. They are desperate to raise enough cash to keep going for a few more quarters.
  • A none core business that doesn't make much money.

    The clipart is sold cheap and frankly it must have cost something to assemble and catalog so intensely. My guess is that it lost money. Hamera on the other hand is a startup with rapid growth and the possibility of catching one of the few remaining internet stile IPOs.

    Make no mistake about it there are a few of those left and Corel is likely to cash in on one. rebel.com ( Worst company renaming in my memory ) and this new corp are both likely candidates and Corel has a whopping 1/4 of each.

  • The problem is, the man has a point. The Canadian government has a completely antiquated approach to dealing with big business. Only recently did they reform how stock options are treated in Canada.

    As for Canadian bilingualism - wake up folks! Multiculturalism was invented to capture votes in the 70s, particularly from Quebec - it has nothing to do with "respect" and "diversty" - those are only catchphrases to lull the idiots into thinking it is unassailable as an idea. Pushing this ruse on the public is a formula that has worked - the parties that have pandered to the French the most have always come out on top - typically placing a federalist Francaphone in the PMs seat.

    As for taxation, the Canadian government continues to extort the public for its ridiculous social engineering programs - the CBC comes to mind. A government television station...hello, are we in Cuba? The feds have kept this turkey project going even though no one has tuned in for decades, other than to watch hockey.

    Canada really does mean well - its a sound premise - the best notions of American liberty with some sound social principles..but it was hijacked in the 70s and turned into a social engineering experiment the likes of which have hardly seen the light of day outside of Scandanavia or France.

  • Aren't trolls intentional flamebait?

    That was not intentional flamebait.

    That was my opinion.

    So you make my opinion feel worthless?

    You make it feel trashed, and stomped apon?

    Just like those bullies at Columbine. But I'm not a fucking psycho who will shoot you. I'll just remember this day.

    Communist, limiting my freedom of speech by subtracting from my freedom of association.
  • I am dotcom of borg. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. Unfortunatelly just because a company is supportive of it's local environment the company does not reap financial benefits. Surely you realize that the industry is not necessarily friendly...sometimes being the nice guy does not pay off...often it doesn;t pay off if you are in the technology game. Doing the business in the valley may be pointless in your perspective but there most definatelly is the funding and gathering of skills to promote the growth of technology. That isn't to say it's a good thing or the only place where this can be found...but it's often the most recognized. ./bot

  • insert topic of conversation, make blatently obvious conclusions using only the facts presented in the original slashdot post, disregarding the article completely, use lots of exclamation points (!!!) to get your point across.

    (insert moderators moding you up

    hey, it's worth a try, i'm just too lazy to try and actually work for my karma today : )

  • With the way the us patent office is handing out patents Its sounding more legeal every day.
  • Running a application.. even a wordprocessor... under an emulation adds an unnessisary layer.

    Back when Dos was brand new it's only applications came from CP/M.
    This was done by using a simple CP/M emulation layer. This was made easy by the fact that the 8088/8086 is fuctionally identical to the 8080/Z80/8085 and Dos is functionally identical to CP/M.
    When I say functionally identical I mean it dose everything the preveous dose exactly the same way... the emulation is a braindead converter. The result is a binary of the original program rearanged to run on the new environment.

    But even this simplistic conversion results in software running slower on the PC than it dose on CP/M.

    CP/M and Dos are identical environments but an emulation ends up giving slower results.

    [Side note the advantage of the 8088 was it had 16 bit functions. It was itself an 8 bit chip carrying 16 bit logic. Translated CP/M code dosn't take advantage of that logic... other than that a 4.77mzh PC clone and a 4mzh CP/M box looks about the same... ok the PC has more ram...]

    Linux and Windows are compleatly alien...

    A Windows emulation is a heavy interface later allowing software expecting Windows realitys to work under Linux realitys. The diffrence is day and night.

    The result is the software runs slower, needs more memory and more resorces....
    It makes Linux look defective and dosn't take advantage of the way Linux works.
    Instead it must force Linux to work the way Windows works.

    As an Amiga user once said of this (Irronicly refering to WordPerfict for Amiga back when WordPerfict for Windows didn't exist) "If I wanted Dos I'd use Dos"
    Just as Amigas can emulate PCs and boot Dos Linux boxes can run Windows (Not even emulate anything.. just dual boot).

    Tacking on unnessisary layers makes Linux slow down and look bad to users who don't know what is going on.
  • It takes a little bit of a mindset shift, but I've finally come around to arguing this point:

    A Windows application compiled with libwine _IS_ a Linux application. It's a chunk of code that's been compiled on a Linux box and linked with a static library that handles display issues and threading and such. But the binary that's output is a Linux native application -- the only external dependancies are Linux libraries and the kernel. The fact that the source code speaks Win32 is no more important than, for instance, the fact that Perl's source code speaks Posix/Unix -- ActivePerl is still very much a Windows application.

    In this configuration, Wine can be thought of as a tangled overcomplicated widget set, handling windowing, display, and threading. It's really only about twice the size of GTK/glib, and less than 50% larger than QT (source tarballs being used for comparison), so the comparison is not too much of a stretch. Plus you get the exciting side bonus of being able to run actual Windows binaries under pseudo-emulation in the other 'traditional' configuration.

    I know it's easy to pooh-pooh an application because its source code is originally Win32-based, but really, what is a 'native' Linux application? One that makes only kernel calls? One that only links to libc? If WordPerfect is not 'native' then it could safely be argued that Communicator, for instance, isn't either, since Motif, a display library not 'native' to Linux, is statically linked in.

    Once we've compiled an ELF binary whose only external dependencies are libraries that come stock with every Linux distribution, don't we have a native Linux app?
    --

  • Re:What is really significant for Corel this week. (Score:3)

    by Phexro ( 9814 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @08:24PM (#926157)
    (this is not a troll. it's my opinion. please read it all the way through before moderating.)

    star awful-ice is a heap of shit. it's bloated, slow, and forces that horrible browser/file manager/word processor metaphor down your throat. what sort of godless wretch would design such a useless interface?

    now... consider mozilla. it's taken two years to get to the point where they are considering a beta release. star awful-ice is (in my estimation) at least twice as big as mozilla - (correct me if i'm wrong, please) you do the math.

    and even if star awful-ice does grow to dominate the linux office suite market, there are going to be high-quality alternatives, such as abiword.

    until sun gets their act together with star awful-ice, more power to corel. they are leading the way for commercial software houses, by proving that their apps can be ported to linux. they have good products (quattro pro kicks excel's ass any day) and are a good company, despite their current financial problems.

    plus, with corel's current level of commitment to linux, if they go under it's a possibility that they will just release their code. i'd much rather see the code for wp/qpro released than the trash from sun.

    --

  • I'd like to know what kind of idiot moderator would bump ridiculous trash like this up to a +1.
  • Like some pile of rocks in the jungle called Chicken Itza qualifies as a city!

    My dear anonymous friend, Tenochtitlán by the time it was "discovered" by Spaniards was one of the biggest, richest and most beautiful cities in the fucking world. It had estimated population of 150,000 to 300,000. London had about 200,000 in 1600.

  • Corel may need cash badly, but this deal didn't get them any. They got a 23% stake in Hemera and no cash. See http://dailynews.yahoo. com/h/nm/20000717/tc/corel_dc_3.html [yahoo.com].
  • OK, I stand corrected on the Quattro ownership. However, are you sure that Quattro isn't using Winelib while wp2000 is emulated? The difference in reliability is striking.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Re:The problem with Corel is... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yup, all the taxes and socialism has really killed the economy out here. Jeez, if we could only be as advanced as Mississippi.
  • I guess it depends on whether you're talking about repeats by the offender or repeats by the person convicted. Nothing off the top of my head, but I'm sure you could find cases where the wrong person was executed for a murder and the actual murderer went on to kill again.
  • Actually, in a lot of ways I'd rather live in Mississippi than California, although Mississippi isn't my pick of the best places in the southeast to live... I've actually contemplated moving to central Florida. Georgia and the Carolinas don't seem that bad either.

  • Only the stupidest of companies are in "the valley" or near redmond. Cripes, in a technology age, you can do business in antartica! No, most of the sucessful businesses are in "strange" places. where they aren't taxed to death, have to make their employees pay $3000.00 per month for a studio apartment (or drive 1 hour to work) and in retrospect, can pay the employees a realistic wage (Getting $100-200K as a sysadmin in the valley is the same as $50K in the midwest. and I have a better life here in michigan! and I live where a lake is in my backyard! (bite me valleyboys... I go powerboating as soon as I get home!)

    No, only the stupid would want to be in the valley.
  • I'm sorry to say this, but you're wrong.

    WordPerfect and PhotoPaint in their Linux versions are Win32 .exe's, running under Wine. You can check that yourself (the /usr/bin/photopaint thing is a shell script, launching wine and a /usr/lib/corel/[...]/paint.exe which is the actual program).
    They're not native linux binaries, using libwine.

    As I said, check for yourself.

  • In Ottawa (not that many people who read these articles probably care) you can see the big gold Corel building from the Queensway at 5pm from the Carling Parking Lot (rush hour) on your way generally anywhere. Now I've used MS Office and it's not bad; however, what it holds over WordPerfect is indeed a paperclip or Einstein.

    WordPerfect Suite is great. It does everything most people would ever use a word processor for, and I use it regularily. They should focus on this. PhotoPaint is neat, but Adobe PhotoShop is practically and industry standard, they should give up on that. Corel has demonstrated that they can produce Linux software (albeit QT based) and should *really* focus on that. I don't know if making their own distribution was a great idea, but the linux version of WordPerfect wasn't that bad.

    Instead of working on a Desktop for Linux, I think they should work on Desktop products. Create the office suite for Linux, support the three most used widget sets (QT, Notif, GTK) and make their money selling office software on Linux or even all UNIX platforms. We have to pay for this software now, they can make money off it in the future.

    I just think they tried to do too much at once.

    Working right down the road (at Trytel Internet) from Corel gets you thinking a lot about them. :)

  • So What? (Score:3)

    by SEE ( 7681 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @06:01PM (#926168) Homepage
    So what if Corel has sold off its library of graphics? It didn't sell off its software (like CorelDraw), and it kept royalty-free redistribution rights. So Corel spun off an non-core buisness. Big deal.

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • C'mon, why do people have to bring this up EVERY time Corel seems to be having problems (and sometimes even when they're not)?
    Yes they did try to port WordPerfect to Java, and they did. It was one of the better Java program ports, but it ended up that in order to make it small and fast enough, they had to take out features that people demanded. Remember that this was around 1996....everybody thought Java was god at the time.....so get over it already.
  • Those are all good questions, but I have one of my own. What does "GraphicCorp" do? Are they the ones who do CorelDraw and photopaint? Something else?

    The majority of those who oppose the death penalty have never been a victim of violent crime -- CNN
  • Corel Draw was the only program I've ever seen with a genuine y2k issue. In June 1999, I got constant GPF's from the app. Tech support told me to check the date on my system, and sure enough it was set for June 2000. A switch back to 1999 fixed the problem.

    I'm going to miss their product.
  • OK let's try to get somewhat informed on the situation before spouting a pile of crap will you? The government doesn't run the CBC, it just funds it.

    Whats the difference?

  • Corel & Novell & anyone else (Score:4)

    by Rader ( 40041 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @06:04PM (#926173) Homepage
    Oh yea, Corel is selling "Hemorage"!!

    Corel should just bow down to Microsoft and let Office reign supreme. Ever since the helpful magic paperclip, MS Office ruled!

    Rader

  • Cash strapped and confused as Corel may seem, this move would appear to me to be a consolidation and focusing of Corel's main products (those being WordPerfect Office Suite et al.)

    In fact, having a former life in the photographic industry, I could never figure out what Corel was doing in the stock photographic / images business anyhow. The quality of their libraries were fairly well below the industry normals in addition to some fairly draconian and muddled contract agreements.

    In particular, there was an instance where a former employer of mine used some Corel stock images for their catalog. The photographer who actually took the shots summarily attempted to sue my former employer. When Corel was contacted, we learned that certain images in the library were still property of the original artist.

    This caused us some deal of confusion since this is not the not the norm for stock photographic images.

    This is a prime example of a company getting into a business they really didn't understand (Corel), its about time they started dumping their ancillary business and focusing on software development, rather than services like stock imagery.

  • He'll probably say that PBS is just "a project in social engineering" or some other such unfounded, uninformed crap.

    PBS is largely privately funded. It is completely different from the CBC, which is paid for by the government (advertising fees do not defray the cost of running the network - since no one is watching, the ycannot charge competitive rates).

  • Its sad really... (Score:4)

    by DavidOgg ( 200113 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @06:09PM (#926176) Homepage
    I wish them luch, I've been using Corel Wordperfect Office on Win98 and Win2k just to avoid supporting MS Office. I would like to see Corel survive. the new Redmond Applications unit will need competitors.

    Corel Office 2000 is a bargain! You can get the whole darned suite for $20 at most places (OEM version) If people cant buy this product at THAT price, then Microsoft will never have any competition I guess.

    What would it take for Corel to regain the Office market? How inexpensive do they have to make their products before they're seen as an alternative to MS?

    I'm not positive about this, but I'm pretty sure WordPerfect is the only Windows platform product that supports DocBook, anyone have info on others? I dont think Word supports this?

    The success of Corel would be a Goodthing(tm), We need more companies like Corel and Adobe that are not swallowed up by Microsoft. I wish them luck, and will continue to support them.

  • Another right on. From an American. Not all of us are clueless microserfs, contrary to popular belief.

  • Good Move (Score:4)

    by MatriXOracle ( 33400 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @06:14PM (#926178) Homepage
    GraphicCorp is just a division of Corel that controlled a library of images. I think the only product this affects is a web site where they sell rights to the photos. I doubt it was doing much business anyway. I think this is a good move to concentrate on their core products.

    I'm from Ottawa, and something else that was in the news here today (which I doubt appeared anywhere else) is that they closed one of their satellite offices in town to consolidate into their main building. This is logical cost-cutting, and as it doesn't affect their main businesses, I think it's a Good Thing.

  • This is NOT Corel's death-knell, they are merely selling off some of their clip-art libraries. It's not like clip-art is their core business. They even get to retain permanent license to the material, so that they can still sell clip-art with their graphics programs.

    This seems like a win/win scenerio, and annother case of Slashdot overemotional reporting.

  • I'm more concerned that the same murderer may be executed twice.

    You, sir, are legalized flamebait.

    If I had a sig I would have sold it by now.
  • What is really significant for Corel this week is not the sale of this little division, but the rumors that Sun will GPL StarOffice, which were repeated on CNET today sounding less like rumors and more like official news releases.

    Corel's WordPerfect has been viewed as their unique advantage. However, WordPerfect isn't even really a Linux application! It's a Windows application running emulated under WINE. They don't say that on the box, either. Quattro, their other "advantage", runs excellently in native mode under Linux, but it's not Corel's any longer, since their merger with Borland/Inprise fell through.

    How much of an advantage will Corel retain once other Linux distributions pick up StarOffice and when Free Software developers put real work into it?

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Corel should move to the Valley. Otherwise they just don't stand a chance.

    Or even better, a less highly taxed and less socialist state than California, like somewhere in the midwest or southeast...

  • I can believe that it's not a troll. Quite a while ago I was making a web page and I picked up a cheapie clip-art CD from Kmart or something, manufactured by Corel.

    The contract specifically disallowed publishing those graphics on a website.

    I wondered what the purpose of clip-art was if the license didn't allow someone to use the art.

  • That's not entirely true. GraphicCorp also has some image editing applications, among them a very nice program called PhotoEditor (which blows away everything else when it comes to make *small* JPG files). Tho it's normally only seen in hardware bundles.

  • While I was never sure about the office java thing, I think it was just a rumor, but could have been true.

    Oh, there certainly was a "Corel Office for Java". I found an old review of it here [networkcomputing.com] for anyone who cares. From what I remember of the development version I tried, it was an impressive Java application but a next-to-useless office suite. It's now residing in the "where are they now?" file, next to Microsoft Bob.
  • I think the "prior art" part of that would prevail... although Microsoft should patent the method of "causing other companies to fold", then license its patent only to itself, and use it on itself...
  • Geez. I started three companies this year, raised Millions of dollars to finance them, hired their CEOs, and I have a 3-month-old baby. Just how much harder do I have to work?

    Bruce

  • You are correct about winelib, however corel did
    NOT compile wordperfect 2000 against winelib, they
    actully made a windows executable with a special
    version of wine to run it.

    Get the facts before suggesting moderation for
    "incorrect" info :)

    - From Jaymz with love!
  • I stand corrected on the ownership of Quattro.

    Bruce

  • wp2000 uses WINE, not winelib. I wish it used winelib. But all you have to do is run "ps" to see it using WINE. 8 wine processes accompany it in the world.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Yes, but you are talking about libwine. WINE, on the other hand, is an emulator, and that's what is running wp2000, which is a Windows executable.

    Bruce

  • Sure, you make an easy to use distribution, but anyone can just download it, so where's the money in that?

    The money obviously isn't in selling linux. That should go without saying. The money is in selling the other programs that you can't download for free. Perfect Office for example. Corel has problems, yes, and they may not make it, yes, but it's not because their linux excursion is based on a faulty business model. This is a tried and true business model. You think M$ makes much money off Windows? They make the bulk of their income off their application programs (and support contracts) and sell Windows for practically nothing because it increases the demand for those products. Since M$ is using their control of Windows to kill Corel, Corel is seeking to stay alive through expanding to the linux market, and expanding the linux market itself with their distro. This may or may not work, but it's certainly sound strategy.

  • Gnu's Not Unix but Linux might be.

    WINdows Emulator is an Emulator. WINElib is more of a hybred.

  • A majority of the population is against the death penalty

    Which population are you referring to? Certainly not the entire world, so my next guess would be the U.S., since that's where your sig says you are. If that's the case, you're very incorrect, because a strong majority of Americans favor the death penalty. I think it's a great thing, myself.

    As for Corel, it's just about time to stick a fork in 'em. Stock in the crapper right around 4 (although this move might raise the stock), big ol' money problems (seems doubtful that this sale could help here all that much), and unstable leadership.

    Seeing all the stories about dying friend-of-Linux/OSS companies, it kinda made me wonder what companies are actually succeeding by embracing it. It's gotta be hard for ESR to sell his little Cathedral/Bazaar pipedream to companies when the wreckage is strewn all over the highways for the decision-makers to see.

    What's the new release date target for Mozilla, anyway?

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Yes, he linked to the "Brucedot" user info. Big joke.
  • Can you define "emulator"?

    I'm asking because WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator".

  • See here [freshmeat.net]. The wery first sentence. Unfortunately winehq seems to be down right now so I can't find it there.

  • Honestly, I don't think StarOffice will have that much of an effect, GPL or no GPL. As others have pointed out, it's an absolutely enourmous codebase, and while Open Source has a great track record on projects suited to it (such as the kernel itself) you only need to check out Mozilla for proof that there are some projects it isn't as well suited to, and it is no panacea. StarOffice looks a lot more like Mozilla than Linux to me. At best I expect that if StarOffice is GPLd it will be a boost to projects like AbiWord that will be able to cull it for useful snippets.

    Quattro is of course not affected by the Borland merger falling through, but you know that by now. Quattro and WP itself are IMOP far superior products to the M$ competitors, that have been beaten rather badly solely as a consequence of M$ marketing clout resting on control of the OS. Their strategy of trying to produce an end-user friendly linux distro and convert Windows users to Linux (knowing full well that their products simply by virtue of being commercial are unacceptable to a good chunk of existing linux users, and that the people that could be customers are not going to be that eager to change operating systems) is a ballsy move, and I am honestly a little disappointed you seem to want to give them short shrift. Win or lose, they're fighting the good fight against Redmond, and you have to admire that.

    I'm sorry to hear you are having trouble getting WP working, but the earlier version that I have here works just fine, I can't help thinking this must be a problem particular to your installation. Admittedly I don't use it that often (I'm a text editor type not a word processor type by inclination, and I also avoid using proprietary software when I can reasonably avoid it) but it is very handy for converting word documents, and adding formatting to text before printing it out, and I've certainly gone well over 4 pages in it. With my link I won't even attempt to download StarOffice, but I have had occasion to use it on another machine, and I must say I was singularly unimpressed. Big (enourmous actually) slow clunky and not at all in the same league as WP. Maybe the subset of hackers that really want an office suite will find it usable, but I don't see many secretaries finding it usable - or many financial officers wanting to write big checks for hardware upgrades to run it at an acceptable speed for that matter.

    Finally, I want to say that the programs in the WP suite are far from Corels "unique advantages" - but I have to admit at the moment that statement may be fair. That's what they have on Linux right now. If they can survive a few more months we may see far bigger stuff ported though - things like CorelDraw, Painter, Bryce, and Ventura. WordPerfect is a toy compared to Ventura. The GIMP is great for basic graphics manipulation, but it's no Corel Painter. And I can't think of any Free Software that even attempts to be comparable to Bryce. Truly professional level painting, 3d modelling, and DTP programs are things that the hackers can and will live without, but they are also things that a great many offices cannot. These offices will therefore have no choice but to continue to run Windows or Macs if Corel goes down.

    Given all that, I honestly don't see your position here. And I usually find myself agreeing with what you write.

  • Not to sorry to see you go Corel, I just wish you didn't buy Metacreations stuff in a desparate attempt to make yourself more valuable.

    You really screwed up when you decided to buy Wordperfect from Novell just for the name recignition. Now you ended up like Novell, a dead company after a buying spree. Your assumptions about the mac market were all screwed up too. Mac is a professional graphics platform, not a cheesy PC cheap-o DTP wannabe platform. You either make the best graphics apps and demand top dollar or don't bother. I use graphics apps like Photoshop and Canvas, but the ONLY app I ever wanted from Corel was Wordperfect, and you never delivered. Just as well...the Wordperfect you delivered to other platforms was more bloated than Office.

    Good bye Corel, and don't ever come back.


    ---
    >80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
  • Gnu's Not Unix but Linux might be.

    no, Linux Is Not UniX either :-)

    greetings, eMBee
    --

  • I agree with your comments abaut parisians. I lived there for three months, the worst of my life. I have never seen so many arrogant people.

    As for Scandinavia... well excuse me. I ve been here for student exchange during the summer. And I still have to see a homeless people begging for money on the street, a murders, violence. OOoops sorry I forgot that for "USians" violence is a VALUE.
  • If you simply run "ps" while wp2000 is running, you will see 8 WINE processes. They are, I swear, running the wp2000 Windows .EXE file.

    Bruce

  • The Java port of the WP Office suite had reached a reasonable beta quality by the time they scrapped it. Public demos were available. It has a pretty broad feature set, and an interesting, somewhat StarOffice-like single-window user interface.

    However, this being 1996 and Java being what it was back then, it was too slow to be useful on 95% of the hardware of the day. The level of polish, while not perfect, was very impressive considering that it was done with AWT, these being pre-Swing (and pre-JIT) days.

    Since it needed insanely fast hardware (for the time) to run, the goal of deploying it on low-end networked computers wasn't realistic. Add to that the clear trend in the world of terminal computing toward very-thin clients (X, Citrix, Tarantella, etc.), and the reasons for making an office suite for Java-enabled diskless stations fall away. Corel put their thin-client energy, such as it was, into projects like the NetWinder and GraphOn's Citrix-like remote-display-server technology.

    It wasn't a "rumor". It was a well-publicized project and a nifty proof-of-concept with working demos open to the public on their website.

    The computing world wasn't ready (literally, from a hardware standpoint) for large-scale Java desktop apps at the time.. but Corel, incompetent though they may be, did manage to prove it could be done.

  • Neither the efforts of corageous people like the FLQ, eh?

    Generally its bad form to refer to terrorists as "corageous people". You are'nt by chance a member of the Quebec Language Police are you?

  • You Canadians really must have emotional problems.

    Here in the greatest country ever anywhere (read USA), companies fail every day and we don't take it as an affront to our nation.

    My advice to you Canadians: Join the union. We could use a few extra states.

    Same for Siberia. We could use a new state: West Alaska.
  • Auctually that would be a brilliant marketing move. Then they sell off their patent to some other company which quickly goes public and is bought out by Corel executives as soon as Corel goes completly dead. They then wait for another business to die a slow painfull death and sue there asses off while they still have some money left. Of course they would have to make several patents to maximize profits. Sorta modularize the proccess.

  • I guess that must be another one of those made-up-on-the-spot statistics. Here's a web site with statistics I found while digging around at the ACLU: http://www.essential.org/dpic/po.html. Of course, the ACLU is hardly any death penalty proponent's darling, but it's nevertheless an institution with a high degree of credibility.

    Regarding the statistics for Europe in particular, that's your wishful thinking. Germany for example hasn't had the DP since 1949, has much lower violent crime rate (recent sprees notwithstanding), and there would simply be no impetus for a majority of the population to be in favor of the DP. Show us some figures please.

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu
  • Corel needs something that will push it on top I don't think this is it but what I do think do it if they make a true U*NX version of the office suite then I believe they will have a chance and if port to Beos then they will be on better ground. Will we will see if they can pull it off
  • Just an aside, really. If my original post was marked as off-topic, all subsequent replies addressing its contents rather than pointing out that it's off-topic, should also be marked off-topic, right? Just wondering...

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu
  • sorry to break to ya AC. My comment was no troll, that really did happen.

    And I think the quality of the Corel library could be debated, as much of that would be a personal artistic opinion (unless by quality you mean that the images were well scanned, which they were no doubt).

    Making money would be debatable since managing a stock photographic house is a more than full time pursuit. Do you think those images just wander into a library by themselves. Stock image houses look very profitable, however rquire massive amounts of maintenance to run on a dialy basis.

    so....nah nah nah

  • Corel's WordPerfect has been viewed as their unique advantage. However, WordPerfect isn't even really a Linux application! It's a Windows application running emulated under WINE.

    And this matters how?
  • How about the most viable commercial threat to MS office? WordPerfect/Quatro/Paradox. Yes, we have Star Office, which has the virtue of being free, but its not yet nearly as mature or full featured as this set.

    I find that fairly important and worth preserving. (Besides I'm a Paradox Junkie :) QBE is THE way to interactively work with data stores.)

  • God forbid Corel gets an application for Linux out on time by using libraries which they helped develop.

    Now, if only it worked! OK, it must work for someone, but not me. I tried the thing, I made a sincere effort to use it in my office. Wine wedges, the application crashes, dialog boxes flash rapidly, windows don't come to foreground.

    Report from my administrator: it stops after you type 4 pages. This was paid-for software, not a demo.

    Bruce

  • back in the JDK 1.0 days. You can't really blame them, though. It was good for applets, and thats what people wanted to make. One of the biggest problems in the office Suit was that java only supported something like 5 or 6 fonts (rather then those on teh system, as it does now). Also before dynamic code compilation and other speed optimizations, it was slow.

    Its not that bad any more.

    We don't know how bad things are in north korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN
  • Thanx.I "knew" that I had remembered that Corel had written it in Java.Now I know it wasn't just all the Red Dog's I've had tonight talkin.
  • As for Canadian bilingualism - wake up folks! Multiculturalism was invented to capture votes in the 70s, particularly from Quebec - it has nothing to do with "respect" and "diversty" - those are only catchphrases to lull the idiots into thinking it is unassailable as an idea.

    Rewriting history, huh? So it happened just because the people on top made it happen, eh?

    So then, Quebecers demanding that their unique cultural and linguistic situation be protected had nothing to do with it, eh? Neither the efforts of corageous people like the FLQ, eh?

    A government television station...hello, are we in Cuba?

    WTF? This is is as absurd as saying that public schooling is fascist.

    Canada really does mean well - its a sound premise - the best notions of American liberty with some sound social principles..but it was hijacked in the 70s and turned into a social engineering experiment the likes of which have hardly seen the light of day outside of Scandanavia or France.

    First of all, you probably mean USian liberty. America is a continent, not a nation. (However, if you were thinking of El Libertador, Simón Bolívar, well, then I excuse myself. My experience is with small-minded USians who fail to see the world beyond their country.)

    And what's wrong with Scandinavia? I have plenty of Scandinavian friends, and they love their governments.

    France is a different story, though. It is a country where 20% of the population, the Parisians, are a bunch of arrogant bastards who look down on everyone else. Fascism is gaining ground terribly quick. Expect the worst.

  • I don't know if this guy is trying to be an asshole or what. I live in Canada, I agree with his points about high taxation and a messy federal government. (The provincial government is great, the federal is just being screwed up by Liberals who hopefully will be voted out soon).

    His point that they stand no chance up here is a total load of crap, and it shows that he has no idea what's going on in Ottawa. Consider the companies in this area besides Corel: Nortel, Alcatel, Cognos, JDS Uniphase, MDS Nordion, JetForm, Rebel.com, Catena, Nokia, Cisco, Entrust, WorldHeart, webPLAN, Research in Motion, Dy4 Systems, Marconi, GSI Lumonics, CrossKeys, Lockheed Martin, E-Cruiter.com, ....should I go on???

    The point is, Canada has a huge talent pool, and the taxes are offset by the low currency value compared to the US dollar. Believe it or not, high-tech companies can exist outside the San Jose hellhole, and many are doing so very successfully, thank you.

  • Quattro, their other "advantage", runs excellently in native mode under Linux, but it's not
    Corel's any longer, since their merger with Borland/Inprise fell through.

    Uh.....no. Corel owns Quattro Pro and has for awhile...it's been part of the WordPerfect suite since version 7 or earlier. (7 was Corel's first release.) And Quattro Pro doesn't run natively on linux either, it uses libwine like all the rest of WordPerfect Office.

  • Bagh. Back in my day, companies went out of business with dignity and style.

    Nowadays, these lazy Silicon Valley or fancy schmancy Canadian start-ups don't know when to throw in the flag and give up. The have to weakly crawl around selling off this or laying of that before finally going under. You'd never see a fine upstanding company such as IBM or Xerox floundering around before they went out of business. Once they realized that there was no hope for survival, they'd shutdown leaving an everyone without jobs, abandoning the building and liking it!

  • winelib is not an emulator, but an implementation of the windows API under X.

    Correct.

    This is what Corel's using, so there's no emulation involved. It's a native app.

    No, it's not . See my other post [slashdot.org] on that topic.

    This is a (-1, Overrrated)

    Correct.

  • Televangelism? I know how to get DirecTV, and I know how to turn the TV off when I want. The Klan? Last I checked they were just about everywhere. And although I find them distasteful, it is unlikely that they are going to bother a white boy like me. Rush Limbaugh listeners? You think its any different where I live now? Although the guy annoys me even when I agree with him (which is not all the time of course), he is mostly harmless. He is just a radio personality after all.

    You really think that California is any better when it comes to wacky people, big corporations and special interests running things?

    There is no place you can get away from such things, but at least the weather in Florida is nice. And yes, I do like hot, humid weather.

  • There are racists everywhere, I ran into plenty of them when I was in California. Heck, I saw a black guy and a gay guy start a fight right in the middle of the order line at Arby's when I lived in San Francisco.

    There are plenty of rednecks where I live now (in the midwest). There are plenty of people in California that I find just as offensive (in different ways) than Rednecks.

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