Dr. Michael Cowpland, president and CEO of Corel Corporation, hardly needs an

introduction. An engineer by qualification, Dr Cowpland began his career at

Bell Northern Research in 1964. In 1985, he founded Corel one of the largest

software companies in the world. The company is now helping develop the fast

growing Linux platform; in fact, Corel plans to port a majority of its

applications to Linux. Mike Cowpland talks of his plans for Corel and his

views on Linux to FreeOS.com.

What is Corel doing with Linux?

Corel is basically offering really comprehensive solutions to Linux. We are

doing more than any other company and are also providing complete connectivity

to the Windows world. We have recently launched Corel Linux for the desktop.

This is currently available in North America and can be downloaded from our Web

site. We have made an extremely easy to use distribution that can be installed

even quicker than Windows. The user can also connect seamlessly to the all the

Windows files on the network including Microsoft public files. With the

announcement that we made a few weeks ago, he can also connect to Windows

applications to run those. If someone has the legacy applications that they

want to connect and still enjoy the benefits of Linux, they can do that by

having a single application server serving up the group. So you can have a

cluster of Linux desktops and one Windows NT server and they can all load up

their Windows applications from there and while using their own native Linux

applications on the desktop. So that provides a complete solution where we

provide the basic software, which is the browser, the office suite and the

graphic suite. Then they may have their human resource or accounting software

that they still have on Windows. They can run on their server without having

to run them on the desktop.

Will Corel become a Linux company in the near future?

Well, we are already very heavily a Linux company. That is supported by the

fact that we are we are the most popular download on the Web. If you look

at CNET the number one download site, we have been the number one Linux

download consistently so effectively we are already a Linux company. We are

introducing our Linux suite very shortly and that would give us more exposure

and capability in Linux.

Where do you see Linux 5 years from now?