Corel Linux

» see linux.corel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 15 November 1999 Michael Cowpland launched an operating system from a trade show booth. Not a press conference, a booth, on the floor at Comdex in Las Vegas, which tells you how Corel wanted this read. The line he gave reporters was that DOS had its ten years and Windows had its ten years and now it was time for Linux, and the thing he was standing next to was Debian with a four-step graphical installer bolted on and KDE on top.

The installer was the good part. It autodetected most PCI hardware and got you to a desktop in four screens at a time when installing Linux meant answering questions about your monitor's horizontal refresh rate and hoping. Corel also wrote its own file manager instead of using KDE's, and shipped a tool called SmartMove that read your Windows settings out of a Wine registry and carried them across. That last decision is the one that killed it technically: the forking made Corel Linux less compatible with other Linux software than its competitors were, at a moment when commercial Linux software was scarce enough that you could not afford to be fussy.

The strategy had run applications-first for almost a year before the OS existed. Corel put WordPerfect 8 for Linux online as a free 23.6 MB download on 17 December 1998, and by 19 May 1999 it had logged a million download attempts, averaging over seventy thousand a week. More than six hundred thousand of those came through CNET's Download.com alone, where it was the most popular Linux program on the site. Corel read that number as a market. It was partly a market and partly curiosity, and the boxed OS that followed never came close to the same figures.

Day one was a free download only. The $49 standard edition and the $79 to $89 deluxe edition arrived a couple of weeks later, the deluxe box carrying the full WordPerfect suite and, later, a bundled copy of Railroad Tycoon II. By 29 December 1999 Corel said its Linux had been downloaded more than a hundred thousand times. Microsoft sold more than eighty-five million Windows clients that year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the retreat ~

Cowpland resigned every office he held at Corel in the middle of August 2000, citing new start-up opportunities. He had been charged the previous year under Ontario securities law over allegedly selling about $20 million of Corel stock ahead of disappointing results, and a company spokesman said the resignation was unrelated to that investigation. His holding company was fined $1 million in February 2002, and the matter settled in 2003 with Cowpland paying $575,000.

Corel LINUX OS 1.2, the Second Edition, shipped on 15 August 2000. That is the same day its champion quit. An analyst's summary of his tenure at the time was that Corel under Cowpland had basically bet the farm on moving applications to Linux, and the farm was now being handed to Derek Burney, an engineering executive who would spend the next year pointing the company back at graphics software.

~ what the money bought ~

On 2 October 2000 Corel announced a strategic alliance with Microsoft. The terms, in Corel's own annual report: twenty-four million preferred shares issued to Microsoft at $5.625 each, for gross proceeds of $135 million. The popular reading ever since has been that Microsoft paid Corel to stop doing Linux, and the documents do not support it. The same agreement obliged Corel to supply Microsoft with thirty full-time staff for a year to port the .NET platform from Windows to Linux, and that same month Corel created an executive vice president role for Linux products and filled it.

What the deal did attract was official suspicion of a different kind. In February 2001 the CBC reported that the US Justice Department had subpoenaed Microsoft weeks earlier over the competitive effects of the Corel transaction, asking whether the investment would reduce competition in office software. The question was about WordPerfect, not about the distro. Nobody in authority seems to have thought the distro was worth asking about.

~ the redirect ~

The Register broke the sale on 29 August 2001 from a leak to Reuters, naming Xandros as the buyer at $2 million. The announcement the next day was stranger than a sale: Xandros took an eighteen-month license to the Corel Linux OS and related technologies, Corel took a 5% stake in Xandros and a 2% stake in Linux Global Partners, and the price stayed officially undisclosed. Xandros was staffed almost entirely by the people who had just been building Corel Linux.

Nobody at Corel wrote a goodbye. On 13 November 2001 linux.corel.com was still a working storefront at 5,186 bytes, selling the operating system, linking to the French and German sites, carrying a last-modified date of 11 September. Four days later it was 409 bytes, and the entire page was a meta refresh with a zero-second delay pointing at xandros.com. No thank-you and no migration note. The community site for a product Corel had spent two years calling the future of the desktop was replaced with an instruction to go somewhere else, and that instruction stayed there, decaying through redirects and 400s, for the next twenty-three years.

~ the download that was not free ~

In November 1999 I was fifteen, in Turkey, dialing in from home at whatever speed the line felt like giving me that evening. Corel kept repeating that its Linux was free, and from my end of the wire that word did almost no work. WordPerfect for Linux was a 23.6 MB file. The operating system was a CD image. Neither is something you fetch over a phone line billed by the minute while somebody else in the house waits to make a call.

What crossed the distance was the boxed set, priced at $49 for North American retail. So Linux arrived here the way most things arrived, later and sideways, on CDs attached to computer magazines. Corel built the friendliest installer anyone had shipped and then put it behind the two things I did not have, which were bandwidth and a credit card.

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