Steven T. Hatton wrote:
What do others think about the place of closed source, proprietary software running on Linux?
There are some excellent products only available on the Windows platform for which I willingly paid money for and use on a daily basis. I would so much rather have paid that same money to use it on my SuSE 9.3 installation. I would have loved to have Photoshop on Linux - I've been using it for several years before I started using Linux on my desktop. I am currently using The Gimp on Windows and Linux and must say that Linux does the job so much better. This morning I had to open and edit a PNG image which requires about 1.03 GB of RAM - both my machines only have 512MB of RAM. The SuSE machine was busy so I have Windows a shot - after it fell over twice I decided to try it on SuSE. It opened the image and I was able to do all the editing and save it again without even noticing a decrease in performance. The big problem, I think, is that there is a stigma around Linux that everything should be free and the other that OSS is free. Because of this, there are some companies who tried there hand at the Linux market and failed. Examples of these are Corel Wordperfect and Borland Kylix. Yes both had design faults (like the Borland Kylix IDE requires a specific version of Wine to run which doesn't work on the newer Kernels but the compiler doesn't). Had these been open source products, someone out there would have been able to fix the problems in these products after they were abandoned by their makers. Albert -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.362 / Virus Database: 267.13.3/174 - Release Date: 2005/11/17