Food for Though indeed. :-)....he's not wrong...as in orientation
wise....there's plenty of people working on the servers/datbases/programming
languages etc etc....there's OpenOffice which is a good start for the
business world....but as far as payroll, inventory control, acounting,
receivables etc etc...aint much done in those fields as far as open source
goes....

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"Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message
news:3F44BC65.4020203@noplace.com...
> 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
> -- 
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> Marin David Condic
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>
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>