On Mon, January 21, 2008 4:58 am, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
With AutoCad, the better approach is to get them to port to Linux.... Of course, this is difficult to do as individuals, but small to medium-sized IT departments can. You tell the AutoCad rep that the company's strategic direction is to move from Winows XP to Linux, and that if they want to continue selling, they have to keep up. IF not, you're going to be buying SDRC Ideas, or some other product that fits into your company's plans to NOT migrate to Vista.
The threat of permanent loss of sales is an excellant motivator to these sorts of companies.
The problem is that such threats are only plausible if the customer doesn't have plenty of data locked in a format that only Autocad can fully understand, or will never receive from partners or potential customers files in such formats that need to be read or modified. Not really likely, see: cfr the Autocad paragraph and links in the second part of: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/focus_format_history/ Same scenario here:
Once Linux captures a significant share of business desktops
this won't happen until those business users continue to receive (or are required to send) files in the latest Microsoft Office formats, whatever that is in any given moment. In both cases, the most effective strategy, even if it's unglamourous, to get to the point where you can really do everything you need under Linux may be to demand laws that force all Public Administrations to only accept, store or distribute files in non proprietary formats, or at least formats that are 100% guaranteed to be fully usable under any operating system, with _more_ than one software program. Once businesses know that to keep selling goods or services to the state or city Government they MUST deliver contracts, bids, technical drawings, whatever, in formats that are completely usable with any operating sytems, the rest will happen by itself. And much sooner than if we wait for businesses who couldn't care less of the license of the software they use, not when changing it would make their existing files less readable (= interfere with "business as usual"). Marco -- Help *everybody* love Free Standards and Software: http://digifreedom.net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org