Goodbye Corel!

[Adam Hawton]

Corel to sell off Linux business - see:

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2665020,00.html?chkpt=zdhpnews01

I presume this means no more version of WordPerfect Office, or CorelDraw,
or Photopaint? I'm glad I spent money on a product that will never be
upgraded.

I'm sad to see this, as I think WPO2K, PhotoPaint, CorelDraw etc are good -
also I quite liked Corel's Linux distro (though I mainly use Mandrake now).
I was going to load up Corel Linux in a VMWare virtual machine - will
probably go for Debian now.

Ah well.... time to download OpenOffice (StarOffice 6.x), start using the
GIMP, etc. Can anyone recommend a good Linux vector-based graphics package?
(I know, I can still use Corel's Windows products in VMware - I assume they
DO all work ok in this? - but I would much rather run native Linux apps).

Regards

Adam.

[Xavier Basora]

Adam:
Not quite. The company's bought the LINUX division is headed by Gavriel. His team
at Corel brought about WPLINUX 9. So, I expect some extremely aggressive bug
fixing and marketing from him and his new company.
Further Corel own 20% of the company so I don't see Corel abandoning LINUX but
rather licencing it to another company so that COLOS in particular has more
acceptence within the Penguinista (LINUX user) community. I was stunned to hear
the dissing at the KDE general mailing list that COLOS took. You'd think that it
was MS that had put out its own LINUX distribution
If you go to corel_chat there's a discussion on the sale :)
I sure hope Gavriel will pop by when its convenient and answer our questions
xavier

Adam Hawton wrote:

--
Modérateur des forums français de Corel:
(news://cnews.corel.com/corelsupport.international.francais et
news://cnews.corel.com/corelsupport.international.francais.applications-bureautique)

Modérateur du forum du WP Universe pour les versions internationales
(http://www.wpwin.com/talk)
Contribuidor al sitio español de Wordperfect
(http://www.corelclub.org/wordperfect.htm)

[Adam Hawton]

Hey,

Thanks for the info Xavier. As I understood it, yes the Corel guys made
some good contributions to both KDE and WINE (so I can't understand people
having a real go at them in the KDE mailing lists!). I must admit, I would
have preferred "100%" native linux apps, as opposed to WINE-based apps, but
I thought than WPO2K is a very good start anyway - it does at least enable
the Windows and Linux versions to be released a short time apart, and
reduces development costs & time.

I guess I'm just worried about the future of the Corel Linux line of
products - by this I mean WPO2K, CorelDraw, PhotoPaint, etc... I'm not so
concerned about COLOS, as this is GPL, and I'm sure even if it doesn't
continue as a distro, the good bits will be assimilated by other distros.
(As an aside, I wonder if Corel will remain in the KDE League? Presumably
not.)

I had a quick look at the threads on Corel_Chat - it seems that Gavriel is
highly regarded, so perhaps the WPO line at least (not sure about CorelDraw
suite?) may continue - I hope so anyway. I would have posted in the thread
- but it's late now. maybe tomorrow. I await further developments with
interest.

Thanks again for the info...

Adam.

[Dan Alder]

We have not sold our linux division. We have not done anything at this
point. Please try not to spread rumours around.

--D

--
Dan Alder
Program Manager, Paradox, WP Office for Linux & OEM/ESD Products

[Xavier Basora]

Dan:
yep. Sorry :) I re-read the news article on the sale and then read Corel press release and
then read the news article a third time to make sure I hadn't misread it. I got it wrong.
xavier