One city's move to open source

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Exactly right!

I write in house applications for a government agency. Except for word processing, spreadsheets and a few specialized applications ALL the remaining applications are coded IN HOUSE. creating, maintaining or improving in-house applications are MUCH more economical than purchasing proprietary apps, IF they are avialable, and working with their support staff, which are usually overloaded.

Our switch from COBOL/RPG begin around 1993 with FoxPro 2.5. Then we had to upgrade to FP for Windows 2.6 when support for 2.5 ended. Then our department of 350 workstations began a massive upgrade from Win3.1 to Win95 and the new hardware it required. Then came Visual FoxPro 5.0. Then the upgrade to VFP 6.0. It's either upgrade or become isolated without support. Then Microsoft set the tone at the favorite VFP internet watering hole by stressing the need to learn C#/.NET and hinting that VFP was going away. Dropping 250,000 VB coders into the C# sink didn't inspire confidence that VFP was going to last much longer. Special C#/.NET training forums were set up in a special side forum and many FoxHeads began to grumble. MS MVPs began cheer leading for .NET but the troops continued to grumble. Some began jumping the VFP ship. I was one. MS recanted, to some extent, by continuing to bring out "upgrades" of VFP but the damage had been done, and Microsoft's true intent revealed. While the paradigm change would fit Microsoft single tool approach and revenue model very well, it didn't work well with our existing apps and budget.

For our part we realized that we couldn't continue upgrading our existing apps, which HAVE to be maintained, every time Microsoft wanted to churn the license treadmill for more income. Then came the LongHorn announcement, combined with WinFS announcement, and other exlusive/proprietary technologies which would produce a TOTAL lock-in to Microsoft products. Microsoft would just get too expensive to stay with.

The search for an affordable replacement GUI RAD tool that is **cross platform** was on. Crossplatform is important. Change doesn't take place over night, even when changing away from Microsoft. We are only now converting the last of our old mainframe COBOL/RPG apps, but its take over ten years to move away from COBOL. DOS batch programs only disappeared THIS YEAR! I have no doubt that we will be using Win2K/XP for at leat 10 more years before we finally wiped them off our PCs. There will, no doubt, be a few Windows workstations kept around because some outside speciality app may require them, but there is nothing wrong with that as long as Microsoft doesn't try to hijack the whole show.

Posted by: GreyGeek   Posted on: 12/05/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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