Re: Has Corel been violating the GPL for approx 6 months?
this post is slightly off-topic, so if you are tiring of this thread, stop
reading now.
i tend to think that legal action is a little extreme, especially since the
GPL has yet to be defended in a serious legal battle. (although i think
there is one pending...i seem to remember something on slashdot about it
recently)
i do, however, think that Corel needs to clean up their act a bit with
respect to GNU/Linux and open source software in general. at a recent
ingram-micro trade show in halifax, nova scotia, canada, corel's "booth
bunnies" claimed that "their Linux OS was based on the Debian kernel" and
proceded to show some market share figures for their distro at their
presentation. it was clear that Corel's representatives were not entirely
informed and were very unprofessional.
sgi, by contrast, were very professional and understood their relationship
to GNU/Linux (and also showed the same figures for Linux that Corel had
claimed were for their disro).
as well, i was told by an ibm rep (who was actually a techie) that while
Corel's changes to KDE were documented, they were documented very poorly,
and koffice no longer worked with it. guess whose tech support got many
many requests and complaints about koffice not working? not Corel's...
i am not attempting to start a Corel-bashing session; on the contrary, i
would like them to become a well-respected member of the open source
community. however, my small and relatively insignificant experience
detailed above, along with threads like this, make me think that they are
earning a reputation that is somewhat less than favourable.
perhaps we should compile a list of things that we would like to see Corel
do or change in order to jive better with open source.
just my two cents.
greetings,
aaron
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