XPost: comp.os.linux.advocacy
From: znu@fake.invalid
In article ,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> In message , JEDIDIAH wrote:
>
> > On 2010-11-14, Lawrence D'Oliveiro
> > wrote:
> >
> >> In message , JEDIDIAH wrote:
> >>
> >>> ...this all boils down to obscure niche apps that are Windows only.
> >>
> >> Small businesses come and go all the time. I think the opportunity is
> >> with new startups, who haven’t locked themselves into a proprietary
> >> platform, to adopt Free/Open Source software instead.
> >
> > There is a lot of value in those specialty applications and a lot of
> > domain expertise and automation embedded in them. Simply igoring them
> > might not be a feasable option.
>
> That’s the sunk-cost fallacy; just because all that effort has already been
> expended, doesn’t automatically mean the result shouldn’t be thrown away.
>
> If it were Open Source, or at least the data formats used were open, then
> yes, something would be worth preserving. Otherwise, it’s just a hole down
> which you keep throwing money.
But what is a given individual small business supposed to do about this,
exactly? My small business uses QuickBooks, for instance -- which is
overpriced, proprietary, and in my opinion, just bad software. But we're
not in the business of writing bookkeeping software, so we're hardly
going to write something better ourselves -- and even if we did, we
wouldn't be able to send its data files to our accountant, which is half
the point of the thing.
--
"The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and over-exacting to
anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it
must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll." -- John Maynard Keynes
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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