Victor

You know, my middle name is Viktor...

What about the 1,500 VFP licenses you will need to buy for each workstation? That just chewed up close to a million dollars. And, your numbers assume that you will be able to get the exact functionality from VFP under Wine/Linux as you do under Windows. From what I understand, printing is a major PITA. And, based on what I have read on WineHQ.com - people are running into all sorts of nits - over the most trival things.

You know...one ActiveX control might have saved you 100's - perhaps 1000's of hours of work. You just can't just whack a few ActiveX's out of your app without adding back the cost savings from having those controls in the first place.

Finally, there are the reduced efficiencies. There are implicit switching costs in spite of the favorable licensing terms.

Based on this and using your hypo - the best your client could hope for is a break-even proposition.

Now - if you were going to talk about using a different development tool - then you may have a case.

Trying to fit the square peg - that which is Fox - into the round hole - that which is Linux - economically and technically, takes you out of the ball game.

< JVP >


>hahaha...yes John, all points understood. But ......
>Lets say you have a client that's going to purchase 1500 computers and a windows OS and MS Office for each. Figure they'll save $300 on each PC, $200 on each OS, $500 on MS Office + whatever...so that's what...1500machines times 1000bucks per machine = a cool $1,500,000. Now just exactly how much "time" do you have to spend to eat up 1.5 million bucks? mmmm.. ok lets say yer at $85/hr, so that's roughly about 17,647 hours extra developer time. Considering 50 weeks at 40 hours per week, 2000 hours per year per developer...so that means at $85/hr you could get 8.82 extra developers for the year. So, if it is going to take you more than 17,650 or so hours to figure out how to automate OOo and wack a few activex's out of your app then ya you wont save the client any money. If it takes you 17,650 hours to do that you should consider a new carreer too. (maybe a lawyer or something..hehehehe)
>
>And good to see you back John!