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"Brough, Tom" wrote:
My current project @ work installing Aplaws (see http:/aplaws.org.uk for details) content manager.
Curious - interesting a domain specific open source content management system. The Open Source nature is interesting, but the only implementation discussed is using Resin, on Solaris and Oracle, which looks like just the kind of big expensive infrastructure that could delay deployment, and causes so many projects to fail. Well Solaris is cheap, but you only really get a choice of one support provider. Can it be deployed through cheaper technology? There are perfectly good database, XML, and content management systems using Free Software throughout.
So here's my moral dilemma do I turn a blind eye to my "Free software" philosophy (and technically breaking the law) and ship the laptop with M$ win 3.1
No, even if we thought it was a good idea we couldn't condone breaking your licence agreement. If you want to copy software do it from people who are happy for you to copy it. It'll run GNU Chess 5 in ASCII mode fine, but you might have to drop the default hash table sizes a little ;)
Any suggestions, thoughts and opinions ?
I've been given computers (and asked to take away and dump) second hand boxes of a far better spec than the one your working with. P300, 128MB of RAM... My advice would be speak to the big computer companies, big Offices, and see if anyone is dumping something more recent, even Exeter University throws out better computers than this. When they wrote X originally they designed it for when every desktop would have at least 16MB of RAM, and people laughed and said that would never happen ;) Failing that ship it with whatever is licenced to go, and let local ingenuity figure out what to do with it. They can teach basic programming and computing concepts perfectly well on a Slackware system with an old C compiler, it can word process and handle spreadsheet fine, all depends what they are trying to do. I'd say give it to the kids, the main limiting factor on my early explorations of computers was that we weren't just left with the expensive hardware to play. They'll find a way to make it play games, and help with their maths homework whatever you install on it, unless Philipino kids are so very culturally different from others. You can always ship CDs and floppies with better software cheaply later. 10 years is a long time in computing! Witness my big iron posting, supercomputers have 100 times as much memory as was common in super computers when this laptop was built. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.