There's a good article this month in Dr. Dobbs' Journal about the Brazilian development culture. They have always had a 'must be grown here' ethic. They banned DOS in the 80's, wrote LUA, and adopted Linux three years ago as a government IT plan. It's only second to the US in number of skilled developers. Sun GPL'd java because of Brazil. And if Microsoft doesn't at least open up the sources for their libraries, eventually people are going to stop slamming their hand in the door on purpose and write in an environment where they do have source for the libraries.
Seriously, grepping through libraries beats printStackTrace(). Why would you pay for pain when there is pain and pleasure for free? :) Linc Lincoln Rutledge Network Engineer OSC Networking 800-627-6420 >>> "M. Fioretti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 01/25/08 8:55 AM >>> On Mon, January 21, 2008 4:58 am, Aaron Kulkis wrote: > With AutoCad, the better approach is to get them to port > to Linux.... > Of course, this is difficult to do as individuals, but > small to medium-sized IT departments can. You tell the > AutoCad rep that the company's strategic direction is > to move from Winows XP to Linux, and that if they want > to continue selling, they have to keep up. IF not, > you're going to be buying SDRC Ideas, or some other > product that fits into your company's plans to NOT > migrate to Vista. > > The threat of permanent loss of sales is an excellant > motivator to these sorts of companies. The problem is that such threats are only plausible if the customer doesn't have plenty of data locked in a format that only Autocad can fully understand, or will never receive from partners or potential customers files in such formats that need to be read or modified. Not really likely, see: cfr the Autocad paragraph and links in the second part of: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/focus_format_history/ Same scenario here: > Once Linux captures a significant share of business desktops this won't happen until those business users continue to receive (or are required to send) files in the latest Microsoft Office formats, whatever that is in any given moment. In both cases, the most effective strategy, even if it's unglamourous, to get to the point where you can really do everything you need under Linux may be to demand laws that force all Public Administrations to only accept, store or distribute files in non proprietary formats, or at least formats that are 100% guaranteed to be fully usable under any operating system, with _more_ than one software program. Once businesses know that to keep selling goods or services to the state or city Government they MUST deliver contracts, bids, technical drawings, whatever, in formats that are completely usable with any operating sytems, the rest will happen by itself. And much sooner than if we wait for businesses who couldn't care less of the license of the software they use, not when changing it would make their existing files less readable (= interfere with "business as usual"). Marco -- Help *everybody* love Free Standards and Software: http://digifreedom.net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
