Living together BUT not married: RR/MC and Linux

[David Bovill]

Hoping you would reply :)

On 21 Nov 2005, at 18:00, Andre Garzia wrote:

> That's what happens when goverment decides to migrate itself to  
> linux without thinking that in the Real world, people might need  
> proprietary platforms, the zealots excuse is: "if we all move,  
> we'll create momentum to F/OSS so that better apps will be created."

> ...

> Usually after this question, they start barking at me for being a  
> "capitalist bastard"

Yep - was not so bad in Munich - but still... in the project here, we  
inherited Linux based Terminal Servers (Novel) - great for watching  
video and tv / media work??? One of the reasons why I would hesitate  
to embrace the "thin client" ideal of Dans is due to this experience  
- we've now replaced these with mini-macs - almost no difference in  
price.

However again this is not "all or nothing" - I can see reintroducing  
the terminal server approach later - and have made web services and  
AJAX / Rails type frameworks a key part of the online project. This  
is firmly an open source and an open content project - and we use  
Revolution.

> Now, why linux is important for me and why I wanted RunRev to  
> support it? There's another goverment project called PC Conectado,  
> which is aimed in building cheap computers running linux for the  
> masses. There will be two kinds of computers, the really cheap ones  
> that will run linux, and the more expensive ones that might run  
> windows, Zeta, whatever. I am talking about millions of computers,  
> not thousands, millions. One contract with this goverment for  
> bundling your software in the machine and boom, millions of  
> users... That project is a good idea, the bad part is that some  
> spoiled brats in the goverment are ruining it.

This is exactly why some good marketing support for an open source  
strategy would be so effective in getting Revolution used in some  
seriously large initiatives. We all now how easy it is for us to  
deliver quality applications (even on Linux save for the video  
support), and outdo anything that traditional open source developers  
can create in the same time frame by a factor of 3 or 4.

But to do that we need to convince the "zealots" and "spoiled brats  
in the government" - which is not that hard - they like cool toys  
that can deliver as much as the next person. Missing is the business  
strategy and the marketing.