I'm sort of in the same boat. The profitable parts of my business are all Apache on FreeBSD, and most of the work I do at Sandia is FreeBSD (well, they eant it to run on Solaris, but there are enough BSD boxen around that I can NFS and drive from FreeBSD. Sandia, however, runs its corp nets on Doze XP and some of the users expect data to show up in Doze formats like Excel. (Thanks, Perl+CPAN!) Many of my corporate users for my websites also run Doze -- one site is 96.5% MSIE clients -- and they constantly send me doc files and powerpoints.

I have had great experiences with Doze-based software, too. Corel Draw has no replacement, AFAIK, and I use a lot of PC board and chip software that is only available on PCs unless you want to drop $50K for entry-level stuff. However, I cannot think of *any* doze software company that I have had satisfying contact with since Peter Norton sold out. Part of my business used to be electronics design consulting, and I'd get raped regularly by OrCAD and Keil and other embedded tool vendors.

That said, however, I believe that there is a really strong groundswell, especially in EDA, for open source development. People are tired of being raped for "maintenance" charges that don't buy anything, and OS tools like Eclipse (EDA framework), OpenOffice (Office Productivity) and Blender (3D visualization) plus Perl, Apache, MySQL, and all the other old favorites like FreeBSD and Linux are providing real competition.

Yes, software companies are being forced to listen. They will die if they don't, bluntly. In EDA, a number of people are trying to release proprietary extensions to Eclipse in order to lock in customers like they used to, but the customers are getting wise to it. EDA is such a bleeding-edge business that many people pay the tab because you just have to get the job done, but almost everyone I know is spending their extra brain cycles boning up on the extensibility features of Eclipse, gEDA, and SystemC.

In reply to Re^5: Are Perl programmers just easier to deal with? by samizdat
in thread Are Perl programmers just easier to deal with? by CloneArmyCommander

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