MS Access 'equiv' for Linux 3292

On Tue, 05 Apr 2005 11:06:51 -0400, John-Paul Stewart

The demand is not only "perceived", it is very real. Commercial Open Source businesses are responding to these demands (because they think there's money to be made), and paying thousands of developers worldwide to work on delivering commercially relevant products. On the side, another body of thousands of volunteers participate on these very projects without getting paid.

I don't think OpenOffice.org developers are very active users of office productivity suites and i don't think they are only "scratching their own itch". Some are paid, and some may even think it's nice to do the right thing. Same goes for the good people working on something like GNOME, whose mission is to produce a free, user-friendly desktop for the average enterprise front-office worker, sellable by the likes of Novell and Sun and RH, and (partly as a side effect) available for Linux newbies and comfort-driven experienced Unix users in general. Similarly, I don't think many Linux kernel hackers have the hardware at home to make use of most of the deavy duty enterprise features they implement in the kernel these days.

-- Juha Siltala