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On Tue, 15 Aug 2000, Albert C. Uy wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> Hmmm...i guess it depends on what software you are
> developing... i have this mindset that for experimental stuff, open
> source is better since you can pretty much do anything you want
> with it; if we're talking the more conventional(though not necessarily
> easy) data entry, inventory, etc., much as it pains me to say it, MS
> might be a better choice.
>
Only because it's more well-known, not because of any intrinsic advantage
MS software and its paradigms have over what the Free World has to offer.
Fact remains that MS still has market-share dominance and hence it's what
most people are familiar with, and these are the people for whom such
conventional data entry, inventory, etc. applications matter to. MS is
*not* more suitable in this case. It's just that hardly anyone in the
enterprise business community, at least in this country, has ever tried
using a solution from the Free World.
I've had personal experience with this attitude in the real world. A year
ago, a friend asked me to develop an inventory tracking system for his
video shop to replace a proprietary system he had been using until then,
because he wanted a cleaner UI and more statistics on rental to track
where his business was going. My answer was perl scripts driving a
PostgreSQL backend. He has made few complaints in the year since it was
deployed (mostly these were comissions for modifications and improvements
that typically took no more than ten lines of perl code!); his only
reservation is that it runs under Linux, a system he's totally unfamiliar
with. This is the only difficulty he's had; the fact that we've been
friends for many years and he knows he can always call on me if something
goes wrong probably helped him to accept such strange medicine. If we
were strangers I probably wouldn't have been able to convince him to
accept my solution.
<shameless plug>
If you'd like to see what may well be the only Linux-based POS system in
the Philippines in action, visit our shop along B Gonzales St. near
Katipunan. You'll know it because there's a picture of Tux on our front
wall :-)
</shameless plug>
- --
Rafael R. Sevilla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> +63 (2) 4342217
ICSM-F Development Team, UP Diliman +63 (917) 4458925
PGP Key available at http://home.pacific.net.ph/~dido/dido.pgp
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