Re: Commercial programs in Debian
I wish every package was like the one described below. I am not in the
business of advertising the commercial programs I mentioned. I am in the
business of advertising Debian and Linux because these named programs work
more or less flawlessly most of the time on Debian although there are several
unnecessary flaws. And I don't get any warning when they are about to break
(I admit that I live a too risky life in that sense:).
Can we agree on that companies are run by different strategies and the more
programs that run flawlessly on Debian, the more likelyhood there is of
people using it? If the answer is yes, then please advice me to the right
forum where I will either be helped or told to shut up:)
Regards
Gudjon
Þann Laugardagur 6. maí 2006 08:40 skrifaði Francesco Pietra:
> I can illustrate my experience with commercial packages for quantum
> mechanical and quantum chemical calculations. There is at least one package
> for quantum mechanical calculations (don't ask me the name as i am not
> advertising) that is accurate, solves all problems of file type conversion,
> provides input to quantum chemical calculations and reads (graphically) the
> output. Well, this program (absolutely not inexpensive) is distributed with
> the source code. This allows compilation (with assistance from the
> distributor) for your particular environment. More importantly, the source
> code allows you to change parameters - or insert new ones as soon as
> experimental data from, say, IR come out - for the calculations. The latter
> strategy is not allowed by imperscrutable commercial packages, which
> pretend you do chemistry blindly.
>
> This long preamble to an area (chemistry calculations) that will hardly
> find anyone interested here. But I wanted to refer to the philosophy
> behind. In any area, this is the only way to accept a commercial package on
> unix systems. Not only for freedom problems. First of all for technical
> problems.
>
> How do softerhouses survive this type of distribution? As far as university
> quarters are concerned, we honor this type of distribution and pay
> willingly (even for personal use) for them, and keep them strictly under
> the license conditions.
>
> Yours
> francesco pietra
>
> On Saturday 06 May 2006 09:14, Gudjon I. Gudjonsson wrote:
> > Þann Föstudagur 5. maí 2006 08:32 skrifaði jmt:
> > > > Sorry for the disturbion but I would like to mention some things.
> > > > I have been thinking about if it was possible to set up some bug list
> > > > as a kind of quality assurance for commercial programs in Debian.
> > > > Most commercial programs I have seen are only said to be compatible
> > > > with RedHat and sometimes SuSe.
> > >
> > > Mind that most commercial programs, targeted for RedHat or SuSe, are
> > > generally i386 ONLY !
> > >
> > > Second point : commercial program editors want to rely on some king of
> > > system certification ; even if what RedHat or SuSe provide is far from
> > > satisfaction, it can take place in a business process, as a mention to
> > > good practice.
> > >
> > > Third : what made Apple fortune : a very narrow hardware selection ! If
> > > a commercial program had to rely on
> > > - amd64
> > > - nvidia
> > > on top of any other hardware combination you can imagine, this list
> > > would generate thousands messages a day !
> > >
> > > jmt
> >
> > Thanks for your answer
> > You are most probably right in all your points but I can mention that
> > in my case. I need to run the following programs:
> > Cadence, Matlab, Femlab, Sonnet, ADS, ISE-Tcad and Proxecco.
> > Debian is not supported by the producers of these programs but I have
> > managed to make them run more or less flawlessly on my computer. I would
> > rather not need to switch to SuSe nor RedHad, just for running these
> > programs but when advising other people on what distribution to choose, I
> > cannot say Debian because of this lack of quality assurance.
> > Anyway, I see a problem with Debian that might be solved in some
> > clever way but this list is perhaps not be the right forum for these
> > ideas. If anyone could point out a better forum for this idea I would be
> > happy.
> >
> > Regards
> > Gudjon
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