On Aug 3, 2008, at 03:34, Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote: > A bank in Brasil was using OS/2 for their OS in their ATM machines.
It's my understanding that most US-based banks which use text-based ATM's, or 'light-graphical' ATM's are also using OS/2. I have no experience, just folks have told me that. The 'snazzy' ones are of the variety where you can find amusing BSoD snapshots online. But, to the original question, one doesn't get a local bank to switch to Linux for any reason - because they never selected it; they have a vendor which selected it. A large bank may write their own ATM software, but most are 3rd-party. So, that would be the area of focus, the vendors. And I suspect the vendors are highly motivated to keep things as proprietary as possible. It could be the royalty savings would trump that. My guess is their bidding isn't highly competitive (non-commodity product) and they happily pass along royalty costs. Now... if there was an open spec, an open source implementation, and COTS hardware such that a local bank could 'just' build an ATM. Well, best ask a banking IT guy how that might shape up, but at least it would have some chance of happening that's > 0. If one were interested in working on such a project, finding a local bank owner who's well-fed-up with 'both' (for lack of knowledge other than what I see locally) of the ATM vendors might be a place to start. Selling ready-to-go packages for much less than the proprietary guys might be a business model. -Bill ----- Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 603.252.2606 http://www.bfccomputing.com/ Page: 603.442.1833 Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
