On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:29:32 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
Free Software isn't the only hammer in the IT toolbox.
Another point that seems reasonable to me is when there is an OSS option but it is inferior to commercially-available proprietary software, trying to use the OSS solution for business-critical environment where it isn't necessarily designed to work can lead to frustration that paints all of OSS in a bad light. One of the areas that is sorely lacking in many (not all) OSS projects is proper documentation. This is a topic that gets beaten to death repeatedly. A couple years ago, I looked for an open source GIS project and while there were a few that looked like they might meet my needs, the installation/setup/configuration was overly complex and the documentation was severely lacking. So much so that the project got killed because there was no budget to purchase a commercial app. I was able to demo what I wanted using Mappoint, ironically. It took about 10 minutes to accomplish what I wanted once I had the data that needed to be plotted. But as a final solution it wouldn't have worked, because I needed to use dynamic data sources and not just a CSV file imported periodically. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org