On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 03:40:03PM -, shatam bhattacharya wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
> I dont know whether this is an appropriate forum to open this
> thread. I am an ardent admirer of linux and debian in particular.
> Earlier I used to work on FC 1, recently I swithced to debian. God,
> it is loads of fun. I am working for a major software company in
> India. But whenever I talk of using linux for delivering
> applications for clients, strong objections crop up from the senior
> members in the team. The most common points of apprehensions are
> like
> 1. Lack of linux awareness among the clients, generally the clients
> are very hard to convince on TCO Vs legacy issues
Some people will only hear what they want to believe. This is
difficult to change.
> 2. Lack of support from within the company for linux migration,
> marketability etc.
This is also a fairly major hurdle.
> 3. Lack of pool of skilled programmers in this domain
> etc.
This is complete hogwash. Programming "in Linux" is only an issue if
you are developing hardware drivers and utilities very close to the
system level. Other than that, there are so many cross-platform
toolkits for every type of development that it is not even funny. You
should first try to get your organization to migrate from whatever
MS-centric tools and toolkits they are using to something platform
neutral. There a number of good reasone to this even if you only ever
intend to develop for Windows. Once that is done, this point no longer
holds water.
> what I want to ask over here is, 'Is there any systematic approach for
> embracing the linux system for third party application development and
> support'. Also I want to know of firms specializing in support for
> open source software for development firms. I think there is a huge
> potential for linux in India, but only with the right impetus is
> provided, which at this point of time, I think is missing.
What you want is UserLinux (http://www.userlinux.com/), which is
targeted specifically for Enterprise-level developers and business which
are seeking a stable Linux standard against which to develop. Keep in
mind, however, that a platform-neutral approach allows you to not worry
about many of these concerns, except maybe for packaging.
Personally, I would recommend wxWidgets (http://wxwidgets.org) as a
development toolkit. I have personally used it to develop a couple of
small applications. It is under a LGPL-like license that gives a few
extra exceptions that are friendly to commercial developers. It is very
mature and has been developed for about 12 years by Julian Smart and a
team of core developers. The nice thing is that it uses native widgets
on every target system (Win32, GTK, X11, Mac OS X, OS/2, a number of
embedded platforms, etc.). If your code is written portably, then you
can compile multiple targets directly from the same code.
For example, for my Thesis, I wrote a smal simulation program that used
OpenGL. I was able to compile directly from the same code base into a
Windows target, a Linux target, a FreeBSD target and a Mac OS X target.
The application was written in C++.
The nice thing is that if your developers are already accustomed to
Windows development (MFC, and all that) then wxWidgets is very easy to
pick up because of its similarity. Of course, it has a much more sane
design that anything from MS.
I hope this information is helpful.
-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://familiasanchez.net/~sanchezr
pgpDO4gjf5n1C.pgp
Description: PGP signature
