As a Medtech user I thought a lot about James' letter over the weekend.
As has been said before the frustrations he is experiencing with
software vendors are pretty universal.
I am interested to know from the open source gurus on the list whether
any of the following is feasible:
Assuming in the future Medtech decide the move into the Australian
market was a mistake and they want to get out to reduce support costs
etc, is it possible to release a version of software like Medtech under
a GPL for a territory while keeping a profitable commercial version in
another territory, i.e. NZ?
Based on the above would it be likely that a band of volunteers would be
able to help the stranded "Medtech" users develop and improve the product?
Assuming the new "Medtech" can be untied from its Interbase back end
(this time assuming the basic database structure is close enough to
"good") and plugged into Firebird or another SQL based database, can new
(less dowdy) front ends be developed that would run securely in a browser?
Would this ideally use Ruby on Rails?
Jim
Peter Machell wrote:
On 11/02/2007, at 10:47 AM, gspurge wrote:
Peter Machell wrote:
The expectation that software houses should be ready to support a
system that has many radical changes in it immediately on release is
not realistic - and not much different than demanding a Mac or Linux
client, after all they've had plenty of time with these systems to
test them, and probably more immediate potential customers than with
Vista.
Hi Peter,
Is the expectation that software houses that that use MSDE, develop
products that will use SQL Server Express Edition that unrealistic.
That would appear to be the crucial point here. That was launched
November 2005 and it has been well publicised that Vista would not
support MSDE.
By all means let businesses wait and see if they wish to incorporate
Vista. I don't think you can tell that they can't.
I don't think it's up to the user to dictate the database engine, but
I do think that a clever house will produce a structure that isn't
tied to a single engine. MS has them by the balls - if they want to
move to the next DB they probably need to pay a small fortune for the
next version of Visual Mouse Programming Studio for Dummies.
Just like the OS - if it was actually a good product there wouldn't be
the need for all these wholesale changes causing mass disruption.
Look how far OS/X has come since 2000 - we're about to see the sixth
major release, each of which you can install in a lunch hour with
compatibility issues being extremely rare.
Chose platforms and programmes with a solid base, and your
improvements can come in small steps, not giant leaps of faith.
cheers,
Peter.
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