Re: Microsoft Navision buyout?

[Christopher Browne]

> At 11:36 PM 5/7/02, Reinhard Mueller wrote:
> > > Can any competing midrange or enterprise software survive
> > > on Windows, against the $Billions of Microsoft resources?
> >
> >Sure it can. If it is Free Software.
> >Free Software always survives.
> 
> On Windows?   That's debatable.

Indeed.

The APIs change often enough that what's Particularly Keen now isn't likely to 
function anymore in another few years.

Consider trying to run Corel WPOffice on Linux; it uses WINE as part of its 
execution substrate, essentially "running on Windows" even when running on 
Linux.  I did an install of it a couple months ago; a brutally irritating 
process with severely unsatisfactory results.  WINE of 2000 doesn't play too 
well with libraries of 2002, nor do the "native" bits of WPO2K.  It sort of 
barely ran, for a while.  Given another couple of years, it probably won't 
even "barely" run.

And when everything newer depends on COM interfaces, and that gets changed 
over to "BizTalk-SOAP-2003" in "Win2003", well, it sure means that "always 
survives" is debatable.

Frankly, the same is true if you're desperately trying to keep up with 
whatever API GNOME or KDE are using today...

I'll bet that a lot of X11R5 software is still quite usable, though...
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