62 lines
2.8 KiB
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62 lines
2.8 KiB
HTML
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<TITLE>Commercial Port Advocacy mini-HOWTO: What to say</TITLE>
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<H2><A NAME="s6">6. What to say</A></H2>
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<P>Okay, enough about what tone to adopt. What do you
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<EM>say</EM> to convince them that the Linux community is worth
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porting for? Here's what I did.
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<P>First, I explained as well as I could just who the Linux
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community is, and why Linux users would be a receptive group for
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my target company's products. I very carefully didn't
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exaggerate, and made sure that I explained when my figures were
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estimates rather than hard numbers. If someone comes up with a
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way of measuring usage, we may be able to get the hard numbers we
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need for market demographics, but till then we have to do our
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best.
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<P>Next I explained why I thought the Linux market would be good
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for the company to enter.
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<P>Then I laid out the ways in which the company's current
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program line could be ported to Linux. I must say that I lean
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toward using
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<A HREF="http://www.ardi.com">Abacus Research & Development Inc. (ARDI)</A>
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Executor technology as a "wrapper" for Macintosh binaries as the
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easiest and quickest way to do that, but
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<A HREF="http://www.winehq.com">WINE</A>
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and the
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<A HREF="http://www.willows.com">TWIN library</A>
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(as I understand it,these two groups are now working together)
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are all possible tools to help move programs to Linux without
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full-blown ports. Incidentally, I cleared my letter with ARDI
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before I mentioned any action that their engineers might be able
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to take for the company. You would lose credibility if the
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target company acted on your recommendation, contacted someone
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like ARDI, and was essentially told, "We don't know what you're
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talking about."
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<P>There's also
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<A HREF="http://www.lokisoftware.com">Loki Software</A>, which does ports of commercial software
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to Linux. So far they're done only games, but when I talked with
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the president of Loki a while ago he was quite willing to
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consider doing similar ports of other types of software.
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<P>Finally, I ended with a personal note on why I was trying to
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convince the company to port to Linux. Here's a copy of my
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standard letter; don't copy it word for word, but feel free to
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adapt its organization if you like:
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