Absolutely right, Tanktalus. And that's not even considering that nobody'd have a Centronics parallel port on their P999. We have one whole guy who spends his time managing all the old CAD system setups so that they either have their original OS or that they work on a newer variant.

In our case, these are mandates from On Very High, i.e., DoD/Congress etc. I'm not saying that these are a good thing, or that they should be applied everywhere; it's just what I have to operate with.

This survival-think is pushing us to open source in many ways, although there's a counterforce from Congress that is pressing us to put government purchase dollars into the private sector. More and more of our project and line managers are willing to look at the long term costs of closed source seats and hardware versus commodities and programmer time. I am a perfect example of the result of that new assessment; my whole tasking is using open source to solve problems without $$$.

In reply to Re^2: Teams, Personalities, and Getting the Job Done by samizdat
in thread Teams, Personalities, and Getting the Job Done by samizdat

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