I think the discussion would add value by debating on yet another dimension:
I think we have had ENOUGH of this vs that OS wars. Migration / adoption of "this or that" Operating System question is shortly going to be irrelevant at many a places for a variety of "valid reasons". However, what is going to be the deciding line, in most "rational thinking" places, is the applications which most end users are going to use. In so far as adoption by Corporates are concerned, the two most influencing category of applications are 1. Office suites and 2. ERP. Let us analyse this adoption/migration debate in the following light: 1. Office Suite: Can we discuss OpenOffice vs MS Office Adoption / Migration instead of Windows vs Linux, irrespective of the underlying OS? What are the compelling offerings in OpenOffice that will make people move over from MS Office? With the war on suites now shifting to the File Standard Formats, some of the issues we generally discuss are yet again irrelevant. In fact it is the proprietary marriage of Office-suite with Groupware and Collaboration, in form of Microsoft Sharepoint Portal, that is forcing most Corporates to continue with Microsoft Office, than adopting OpenOffice, which is good enough for most users. Do we have an answer to Sharepoint Portal Server? In my opinion, Plone makes a case, but to achieve such tight integration as Sharepoint Portal, we need a proactive community effort. I am still looking at one-easy-way to create and deploy Forms based applications, of course that they should comply to XForms standards. Another viable alternative to Plone has been Alfresco. See http://www.webtekconcepts.com/2007/01/17/alfresco-vs-sharepoint/ and http://www.protocol16.com/2007/05/28/alfresco-vs-sharepoint-1-of-4/ for more details. It is not just plain OpenOffice vs MS Office issue. It is about Corporate Applications getting locked up for lloonnnng times and in turn raising a much more complex issue of migration!!! 2. ERP: Though many an established ERP solutions in the market are known to be available on Linux as well. But how many of these ERP Consultants talk about ERP on top of Linux? How many of these reputed ERP offerings have their application clients [Rich Client] available on Linux? We need to take the "Windows vs Linux" debate to cover newer dimensions. Anand Shankar _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
