Linux & the Business Desktop

Ulwarth writes: "Desktop Linux is running a feature documenting a mid-sized company switching to Linux on the desktop, like the City of Largo but this time in a corporate environment. Proof that it can be done - at least for businesses which need only the 'standard' office apps."

Comments

Re:Anything new? Didn't think so.

[psocccer]

Find me a story where a company that has a $100M invested into their custom accounting/billing solution has decided to throw it out and spend another $100M to rewrite the software for Linux.

Where I work, custom software is the norm. We purchase almost nothing in terms of off the shelf packages and the main system just does it all. The code has been around for about 20 years or so, ported from platform to platform. Currently we're on the NT platform, but after a few bullying letter from MS stating that since we haven't purchased anything in the last year or two from them that we must be pirating software.

Well, that was it, we started looking for a way to move off the NT platform. Our codebase is roughly 4.5 million lines of COBOL code, and the data is archived back many years as well. So we had 2 problems, there was no COBOL compiler for Linux, and anything resembling one was not data-compatible. Until about 4-5 months ago that is, now MicroFocus has spun off from Merant and become a single entity (again). So now there is a source and data compatible compiler for our backend apps. Just change around some directory separators and it just works. No export/import/etc.

I guess my point here is that I've found most anything can be targeted for the Linux platform, especially those systems that are character-based, as many that I've seen are. The GUI interfaces are relative newcomers to the field. And with borland porting toolchains to linux, I'm sure it will just get easier to retarget -> recompile and have shiny new binaries. Even better when the toolchain is just a port by the tool vender, then most likely your data will be fine too. The only exceptions I see that will probably never change are the MS toolchains, MSVC++, VB, VFP, etc. And if you're starting MS, then you probably don't have much choice of platform, though I have seen a gnome project somewhere trying to build up to source-level compatibility with VB.

And I don't want to here any whining about "what if you don't have the source," all I have to say is, if you payed $100M for some software and didn't even license the source, you've got bigger problems than blue screens and crashed desktops. We are a medium sized company, and our code didn't cost that much. And we get to keep it to if the developers go under, plus add anything we want to the source. Now that I'm somewhere that has done that, it makes no sense to buy software for XX thousands or millions of dollars and not get the source... That is a huge risk.