The kind of applications mentioned in this article, payroll system, engineering, art and design
tools, all domain knowledge. For someone like me who rarely come into contact with those kinds
of systems it would be difficult for me to start such a project.
Projects such as mozilla and openoffice both come from companies which can afford to hire
someone with domain knowledge and to do studies on what is needed to produce this kind of
software.
I have never used a payroll system and I have only seen a professional engineering system once.
Where do you find people who know these kinds of software and who are willing to aid in
developing an opensource application? If you look for people on sourceforge.net you will only
find programmers and maybe some artists.

//David Holm

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 12:35:12 GMT
Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> wrote:

> Someone pointed me at the foloowing article:
> 
> http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html?tag=lh
> 
> Its an interesting conversation with the CEO of Ernie Ball - the guitar 
> string manufacturer. Apparently they totally dumped Micro$oft in favor 
> of open source software after getting sued for license infringements.
> 
> The interesting part for Ada is that the CEO is identifying some major 
> holes in the "Open Source" world that he thinks need to be filled. It 
> would be wise to listen to a successful business customer who might pick 
> up on something written in Ada and start using it if it were available...
> 
>  From the article:
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>   You've pretty much gotten by with off-the-shelf software. Was it tough 
> to find everything you needed in the open-source world?
> Yeah, there are some things that are tough to find, like payroll 
> software. We found something, and it works well. But the developers need 
> to start writing the real-world applications people need to run a 
> business...engineering, art and design tools, that kind of 
> stuff...They're all trying to build servers that already exist and do a 
> whole bunch of stuff that's already out there...I think there's a lot of 
> room to not just create an alternative to Microsoft but really take the 
> next step and do something new.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> MDC
> -- 
> ======================================================================
> Marin David Condic
> I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
> My project is: http://www.jast.mil/
> 
> Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g
> 
>      "In general the art of government consists in taking as
>      much money as possible from one class of citizens to give
>      to the other."
> 
>          --  Voltaire
> ======================================================================
>