Corel Corp said Wednesday that it has acquired an ownership stake in LinuxForce Inc, a Philadelphia-based company that provides Linux professional services. Corel, which also warned of poor fourth-quarter results (see separate story), has acquired roughly one-third of LinuxForce, with a three-year option to increase the ownership position to two-thirds. No financial terms were disclosed. Privately-held LinuxForce claims to deliver a full- range of technical services and support for Linux. For Corel, the move extends the Canadian company’s headlong plunge into the Linux arena and will essentially allow it become a one-stop shop for users of the open source operating system.

Corel, which recently released its Linux desktop operating system, claims that in just three weeks more than 100,000 downloads were made from CNet Inc’s download.com site, where it remains the most popular Linux download. The shrink-wrap versions of Corel Linux will arrive in stores this week. Corel is also developing office and graphics suites for Linux, with WordPerfect 8 for Linux out now and the WordPerfect Office for Linux suite slated for availability in early 2000. The CorelDraw graphics suite for Linux will be out in the summer of 2000.

Teaming up with LinuxForce means that we will be able to easily offer professional services for Linux to assist our customers in the deployment and integration of our Linux software, Corel CEO Michael Cowpland said. Cowpland boasted that the company’s version of the operating system was recently named CNet’s editor’s choice as the best of seven major Linux distributions. Still, the CEO lamented that – despite Corel claiming more downloads and more developers – his company only enjoys roughly 5% of the market capitalization of Linux poster child Red Hat Inc.