Corel appears to be betting big-time on Linux as the OS to be reckoned
with. Here's the text of a post from Corel to a newsgroup devoted to the
"Wine" Windows > Linux emulator library:
"Wine is an excellent choice for getting our applications
ported. Aside from the technical aspects, there are a number of
other compelling reasons for us to consider Wine: licensing isn't
an issue, as it is with other Win32 emulation libraries; the fact
that Wine is Open Source means that there's more peer review of
code; and most importantly, efforts to improve Wine so that it
runs our applications well will spill over to other software,
helping to make Wine a more viable solution to run other Win32
apps on Linux. That, in turn, makes Linux a more viable platform
for users considering the switch from Windows.
For all of these reasons, we've decided to put our support into
the Wine effort. We are actively committing engineering
resources to the Wine project. Once our exploration and
evaluation has settled down a bit (read: we've cleaned up our
hacks), we'll begin submitting patches to Alexandre to review and
commit to the CVS tree. We'll be spending some effort on getting
the WordPerfect Suite 8 applications running under Wine, but our
primary focus will be on porting our WordPerfect Suite 9
applications using WineLib. We'll also begin participating
publicly on the WINE newsgroup and mailing lists, so that we can
contribute our ideas as well as our code. You should be seeing
a lot more of us in the future."
What this all means is that Corel is committing to (a) porting some of its
most popular applications as quickly and painlessly as possible to Linux,
through use of the Wine libraries; and (b) that they're committing their
programming and marketing muscle to improving and promoting this open-
source alternative to Windows.
This is obviously very good news. As a contributor to slashdot.org puts it:
"Linux is making plenty of headway into the corporate world, but
there's still a long way to go. If developers won't write linux
native apps, then linux won't have those applications, and the
linux community will suffer as a result.
Having a wine-ed version of every windows application available
is better than the current alternative, which is no linux
support at all.
If more and more apps get used under linux, and the more and
more users switch to linux seeing the advantages of linux being
more important, since the old cliche "there aren't any
applications for linux" won't work anymore.
At the point where the mix is 50/50 linux/windows users,
developers will reach the point where it would be just as easy
to develop for linux and run one of the unix-to-nt ports on it
for the windows based version. This will happen, because code on
linux will be 99% compatible with any other UNIX."
All in all, a signifcant slap upside the head for the Bully Boys from Redmond.
For more information on what Wine is and how it works:
http://www.winehq.com/
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Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Town of Almonte site: http://www.almonte.com/
Business site: http://www.federalweb.com
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