Day 2: Morning Keynotes: Corel

There was a long line to get in (even if it wasn't near as long as it got for Linus' keynote). My guess is that from 1500 to 2000 people attended the keynote (the guess is based on my doing a rough count of the number of chairs, and looking at what percentage of the room was full)

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Here are the key points from the presentation:

They estimate the linux user base today at 12 million users
They have 35 million wordperfect users, and got 600,000 downloads of the freely available version of WP8 for linux
They claim (I'm just using this word because I haven't verified this) to have full microsoft office compatibility
They are commited to open standards, like readable XML (not "binary XML" that no one will be able to read, like microsoft is planning to do). By the same token, they are against forced upgrades by constantly changing the file formats (Wordperfect's file format hasn't changed in the last 3 versions).
They plan to port all their applications to linux, either with native ports, or through the use of Wine.
They announced a Corel Linux Desktop

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Michael Cowpland, Corel CEO

I found Michael Cowpland's presentation very interesting, and he convinced me that Corel was commited to being a major commercial linux player.

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They made several demos (check out the picture library for more photos), including one of wordperfect, and one of the native windows Quatro Pro running on Wine. They are now seriously helping the Wine project in order to get all their apps to work on linux, some as native windows binaries, and some as recompiled binaries that were fixed to work with wine (they didn't go into that much detail, but that was my understanding).

All I can say is Thank you Corel!

You can also read Huub Schuurmans' report and listen to a realaudio feed.

Picture library

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99/03/09 (23:10): Version 1.0