On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 03:40:03PM -0000, 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
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