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I found myself
recently defending
our Windows involvement with a Linux Open Source Advocate. We are
on the same side, but the Open Source purists see all connections
with the Windows world and the proprietary world as unsavory. Here at
the TurboCASH project, we take a far more pragmatic approach.
Primarily we are
accountants or small business owners doing a bit of accounting on the
side. Yes we use operating systems and development environments to
make and run our software, but they are tools. Our aim is to be
pervasive, and if it means dealing with proprietary systems to get
there, so be it. Turning away customers because they are Windows users is
definitely not on our agenda.
However I digress.
In the discussion I started to add up just how much Linux and Open Source is part of
the TurboCASH project. Sure we do develop in Delphi and use
Commercial components, but we do produce a systems very capable of
running in a Linux/Wine environment and we do produce it Free.
However more importantly is to understand that that the TurboCASH
project is not only about the software. It is also about the
communications between the community members that allows this to be
downloaded and support information shared amongst us. The vast
majority of our internal workings run on Linux.
Source forge which
is doing the donkey work of our downloads (up to 50GB per day) is a
pure Linux app. The www.turbocash.net
web site runs on Joomla on a Linux platform. This uses PHP and MySQL.
I am writing this article using a Linux based editor served to me.
All our documentation is done in Open Office a leading Open Source
product for Linux.
It is not a
question about whether we will become Linux, we already are slowly but surely, evolving
towards a Linux future. You can be sure that accountants will be the
last left in the building to switch out the lights on a Windows
world, but eventually we will switch them.
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