Intuit Finally Offers Some Support For Linux

walterbyrd sends us to the ZDNet blog, where Dan Farber & Larry Dignan write: "Intuit said Wednesday it will allow QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions to operate on Linux servers. For Intuit, the move is a bit of a milestone — QuickBooks is the first of its products [to] work on open source software."

Comments

More about the momentum.

[jshriverWVU]

To me this news is more about the momentum of yet another big company hoping to support at least something on Linux. Server side, I don't think QuickBooks will matter much, a client would be more fitting. However what this shows the market is, hey maybe Linux isn't so bad, besides X, Y, Z is supporting it maybe we should.

I'm just hoping this effect builds more momentum till the day when Adobe released a 100% compatible version of Photoshop and Premiere for Linux.

And at one time, it was running there

[WindBourne]

I taught there several times back in the 90's. I was told by several ppl that they had the client running on Linux. Problem was that the marketing ppl were fighting it being there (as well as on the mac). They felt that MS would treat them right and that they had to be ONLY on windows. Marketing ppl are so short-sighted.

One small step.....

[Mystery00]

However small, at least it's a step in Linux's direction, maybe it'll catch another company's eye and help them decide to support Linux. The more proprietary support Linux has the better and one day Linux will run anything you could want, which is what an OS should strive to do.

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[ducomputergeek]

See, this is not the experience I had when I worked for a small software house several years ago. We seriously looked into porting some of our applications to Linux since we were small players on Windows and there was not a lot to offer in our market on Linux.

So we ported one of our applications to see what the viability would be and offered a free version and a pro version for a fee. I think we maybe sold around a 100 pro copies for Linux out of 6200 downloads, but we ran into a lot of problems. Tech support was a bitch. Now things have improved, but at the time we developed for RH and SuSE, but we got emails with: "This won't work on Slackware, or Debian, or pick your version here." Trying to explain we only supported RH and SuSE only tended to make people mad. That's not to mention the amount of email we got lecturing us why everything should be "free". Now, sure we had clients that paid

The windows version had 11,000 versions and about 3500 users that upgraded to the full version. To put it mildly, the Linux market was too small to make it viable because it consumed at least as much time to answer tech support questions as it did for Windows and the user base was 35x's larger. Eventually someone did develop a small application that did about the same thing as ours for free/oss and we ceased development on linux before the company was bought out and disbanded. We had a better product, but what we found when reading what customers told us (when they did) was they'd take second rate free for Linux over paying for something of quality.

Sorry, that was just the first hand experience I had. Personally I got tired of it and bought a Mac in 2002 and have been on OSX ever sense at home and work. One of my reasonings was, "Hell I can run GIMP and my fav. *iux apss and get Microsoft Office and other commerical software." Now there are folks like you, and me (I'll spend the money if it's worth it), but those numbers in the Linux desktop market are very few and unless it's something special, aren't enough to make it a viable market for many appliactions. Again it's chicken and the egg. More people won't develop Linux until there are more desktop users. And people won't use Linux until theirs more applications for it. That was how it was 5 years ago and it's still that way.