Can one company be the dominant OS, application, and development-tools provider for Linux? Well, if anyone can, Ottawa’s Corel Corp. is certainly a leading candidate for the “company most resembling the Microsoft of Linux award.” They sell applications, an OS, and until their acquisition of Borland/Inprise fell through, Corel was looking to provide a wide range of Linux developer tools. This April, Corel’s CEO Michael Cowpland invited Linux Magazine Executive Editor Robert McMillan to tour his company’s shiny gold headquarters and to talk Linux.
Linux Magazine: Corel Corp. is the first company from outside of the Linux space to really bet its business on Linux. How did Linux first come on your radar? It seemed for a while there that you were hoping Java would give you an alternative platform to Microsoft.
Cowpland: Well, the way that Java was originally advertised was a neat concept. But the Java virtual machines didn’t perform as advertised and still don’t.
Sun basically is several years behind in the development timetable and even now they’ve still got their claws in it from the point of view of licensing. Hopefully IBM will beat them down on that to make them more reasonable.
LM: At what point did you realize that Java was…
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