Linux Format forums

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Had an interesting morning today.

Visited our database supplier's open day.

Background:
We run our db supplier's CRM package on a RH Linux system, access it through terminals on windows and Linux clients.

To-day we visited to look at their new options.
Interesting that many of their new plug-ins run on VB, when .net is all the rage.

More interesting was the lunch where we got to meet other users, competitors and suppliers.

The words "Vista" and "Linux" seem to generate the same "haunted" look
in application programmers and windows admins.

A more worrying item was the silence when I stopped talking about Linux.
That silence meant that every other conversation had paused because everyone was listening!

I am not vain enough to think it was my oratory, and it seems that a lot of people are almost as afraid of open-source as they are of Vista.

That sentence was deliberately constructed.

In fact a lot of organisations seem LESS afraid of Linux than Vista!

It is understandable for software companies to be scared of OSS, but look at our supplier:

They provide a complicated package based on a multi-platform database system.

We pay them a lot of money to be there when we pick up the phone, if there is a problem that they can resolve remotely, they can connect through our firewall and sort it..
We moved to their package 4 years ago, and we have expanded it over the years simply because of the quality of their support.

They will never really be threatened by OSS, because what they do is precisely focussed, and they are very good at what they do.

The platform is secondary.

This is the way forward.
Our new document archiving system will run as a web client, so it will run on any platform, when it is finished.
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The sig between the asterisks is so cool that only REALLY COOL people can even see it!

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[Rhakios]

[Nigel]

[wyliecoyoteuk]

[Rhakios]