>Hi Guys,
>
>I see pleanty about the good and bad of M$ but I didn't see anything about what everyone is thinking on the Borland license change. Jerry has this changed your mind about Borland? Anybody have any comments.
>
>John

They have retracted the aggregious policies for all but the Enterprise license, but I think the inclusion was a freudian slip, reflecting darker motives.

My 6 month experience with Kylix brought back bad memories of vendors who deny obvious bugs, slow patch cycles, if at all, and paranoia about interoperability. It is almost as if they felt they could become the 'Microsoft' of the Linux community.

I have returned to KDevelop and C++. The TCO is MUCH lower, the bugs are admitted by the developers (and their discovery encouraged!) and fixed MUCH faster, and it has reached the point that it is almost equal in power to Kylix, especially when the Qt-3.x data-aware toolkit gets fully encorporated.

I have installed SuSE 7.3 Pro and KDevelop on my box here at work, along with Quanta+ and some other web tools. We are shifting to the Oracle backend with a browser frontend for the user interface. This will make us OS independent. With the advent of OpenOffice (or StarOffice 6.0) there is no reason to hang onto the WinXX platform anymore for new development (but legacy apps will require us to keep Win95 or Win98 around for a while, till we rewrite them). This should free up about $300K+ in TCO, when we make the jump (with $200M in tax shortfalls no one is suggesting we pay for a new round of hardware and software upgrades to run XP -- in fact, I've heard that we will NEVER upgrade to XP... and with the announcement of the no-sale date and no-support date, we know exactly when our move has to be completed!), and stop that insane cycle of replacing perfectly good boxes just because the latest and greatest from Microsoft needs another 1GHz of CPU speed plus several more GB of RAM and 100GB more of diskspace. It's getting insane! P266's, P350s and P450s are great and FAST boxes, when they run well written software.
JLK