Corel's Suite (editorial)

Corel is Cutting Costs on software these days. Garrett sent us this note. Ready for a crazy idea? Corel is the best company to try GPLing (or NPLing) their office suite. Think about it: WP already has a unix port, so it has appeal to typical FSF junkies. The primary issue here is how Corel can make money- Netscape has revenue from Servers, but WordPerfect is a major cash cow. Hit the link below to read about the latest concept in my damn foolish idealistic crusade.

The way I see it, Corel is losing market share fast, and they need a boost. GPLing their suite aligns them with the same audience that made Linux. This audience is growing into positions of purchasing power in many corporations. They need to release their suite- source code and all, but with a plug-in API and missing features (Thesaurus, Statistics Module, WordArt?) so that it was similiar in power to MS Works. The commercial version would essentially sell these modules to provide the remaining (less needed, but still important to business) features.

Maybe instead of a plug-in API Corelcould only charges businesses. There has got to be a reasonable way to make a profit at this. Free or heavily discounted software for home and educational use should be a cornerstone of any company anyway. Autodesk did this with Autocad, Apple did it with the Mac, even MS does it. This gets your foot in the door with the students and computer geeks who go to work and buy software.

I know there are other suites for Linux, but none of them are free, have available source, and have the ease of use and power that allows Corel a position similiar in the eyes of business to Microsoft Office. This would provide new users a good reason to use Linux, as well as promoting Corel. They would move tons of software- both on Unix (which needs a good word processor I need beer) and Windows (A GPLd office suite is perfect for all those companies riding the anti microsoft wave that has recently become so publicized).

So what do you guys think? I've seen plenty of Corel machines in my logs so somebody out there must have a connection.