John Pinner - Clockwork Systems

Core Business Applications for GNU/Linux

After initial scepticism in the business community, GNU/Linux is well-established and has become the server platform of choice for progressive organisations. Progress at desktop level is much slower. Many people in the open source community thought that once acceptable alternatives to products such as Microsoft Word (TM) became available this would change, but so far there has been little sign of a movement away from the MS monopoly.

Our contention is that applications such as browser, word processor, and e-mail are not core business applications but just very useful tools. There is a whole business world with which much of the OS community may not be familiar. Businesses need fundamental applications like accounts and payroll. More than that, their requirements in other areas such as sales order processing are often very specialised - all over the country people in offices are using software written specially for them, and for this to be economic OS rapid development tools are needed. We believe that Open Source will not capture a significant part of the business desktop market until core applications such as accounts and payroll are available, together with the tools for software developers to create complementary applications. This talk describes our experiences in this field, leading to the release of credible Open Source core applications and development tools.