Novell will (continue to) support KDE after all

[Evan Leibovitch]

William Park wrote:

>I still don't understand why they sold WordPerfect.
>
Actually, they should have sold it sooner. They understood
infrastructures but not apps.

>They could've ported that to Linux, and everybody would be talking about Novell's WP
>instead of Sun's OO.
>

What if, what if...

Novell unloaded WP to Corel, and DR-DOS to Caldera. The three companies
actually got along well for a while; after all, Caldera began life as an
internal Novell project, "Corsair", and much of Caldera's initial
management was ex-Novellers. Caldera's distribution was for a long time
the only one that could talk IPX on a NetWare network.

Corel indeed did complete the WP port to Linux in 1995, and Caldera
included it as part of its "Internet Office Suite" (I still have a copy).

http://www.mantra.nl/Products/Caldera/Info/

Remember, this was back when StarOffice was nothing more than a crummy
little German (proprietary) Motif-based package that wasn't very good
but was one of the only suites available for Unix.

Corel continued to promote WP4Linux, which it came to sell directly
alongside its own distribution. (It even got as far as testing a
Java-based version of WP, but that was a resource pig.) Then a few years
ago, Corel purged founder (and closet Linux fanatic) Michael Cowpland
and took an investment in Microsoft -- within weeks the Linux port of WP
was killed and its Linux distro was sold off to an investment firm that
renamed it Xandros.

>In fact, Novell could have owned GUI desktop on Linux.
>  
>
They _could_ have owned far more had the will and skill existed.

Remember that at the time it had WP, Novell also owned Paradox, Quattro,
DR-DOS, Unix SVR4 and Groupwise. Now all they have of that is Groupwise,
though they still claim rights to Unix.

- Evan
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml