[GTALUG] Off-topic nostalgia: CorelDraw and WordPerect on sale

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, May 05, 2024 at 10:17:31AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> You're aware that the massive Slashdot thread was about the Beta version of
> their first distro release, right?

Yes, but as far as I recall there was a lot of arguing over at least
the wrapper around GPL tools like apt in the release version too.
The totally nuts license issues for the beta got resolved in the release.

> I was not on the Beta program but I did use the final product.
> I cut them some slack because this was their first FOSS product and their
> teams were not good with the transition.
> That got straightened out between beta and release, which means the beta
> served its purpose.
> The license jargon was cleared up and source code was made available in the
> first and subsequent releases.
> (down the shashdot thread someone actually examined the Corel legalese and
> found that it did NOT violate the GPL or usurp original author rights.)
> The wrapper around apt was to make it easier to use, I was able to use apt
> without restrictions from the shell. Since then many other graphical
> wrappers around apt have been released.

Yes but the other wrappers have been open source, not proprietary tools.
As far as I remember corel wrote a wrapper program around apt that was
open source so they could then call that wrapper from their graphical
tool that was closed source, just so they could claim they weren't
actually calling any GPL code from their code or at least didn't link
against it.

> Did you actually use it, or are you basing your views on a typical /.
> overreaction thread?

I did actually try it for a while.  On a netwinder no less.  I also
tried BeOS on a BeBox around the same time.  That's another OS I find
some people seriously over hype.  It really wasn't that interesting and
made a lot of terrible design mistakes.  If somehow Apple had decided
BeOS in fact was something worth using as the future of the macintosh
rather than nextstep that they went with, I am pretty sure apple would
no longer exist.

> I eventually stopped using Corel Linux, but not for any licensing issues.
> Their proprietary value-add was a little too geared for people who had
> never used Linux before and I didn't need that level of hand-holding. It
> was poor as a server.

Yeah it really didn't add anything particularly useful.

> Still... regardless of one's thoughts on the quality or utility of their
> release, Corel did break ground in introducing Linux to a mainstream
> audience. They had a large presence at COMDEX where they launched the
> product and were the only mainstream consumer software company talking up
> FOSS, at a time when Microsoft was in all-out attack mode.

I would think the nice CD releases with 6 or so CDs from redhat you
could pick up at book stores in the late 90s did a heck of a lot more
than corel linux at getting linux to people.  Corel linux seems like an
easily forgotten nobody in the history of linux distributions.

-- 
Len Sorensen