[Linux-aus] Nomination for Ordinary Committee Members

[Anthony Towns]

On Fri, Jan 06, 2006 at 12:04:46PM +1100, James Purser wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-01-06 at 10:30 +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > Is there either a simple small business accounting package that copes
> > automatically with the various different .au tax rates, comparable to
> > MYOB that runs on Linux? Are there any modern first person shooters,
> > RTS games, or MMORPGs that look modern and run on Linux?
> > 
> > (There's muli, but it's a bit high end; otoh, there's some TurboCASH
> > thing that's even free software apparently now, and has an .au company
> > apparently offering support)
> Modern FPS: QUake 4 and UT 2004 (Mind you I would love to see COD/2
> under linux natively)

Typical that of the game genres, FPS is the one I'm least interested in. :)

> Apart from that I get what you're saying, but we seem to be caught in a
> catch 22 situation. The companies say they wont develop for linux until
> there is a market, and the market wont exist until people start seeing
> that there are alternatives.

Well, the main problem is that people tend to think the above have to be
developed by companies (rather than community run free software projects),
and have to be proprietary, pay-per-copy in order to be profitable
endeavours. (MMORPGs in particular oughtn't to suffer from this, since
an open source engine, and paying for an account on well-maintained and
popular server ought to be feasible; but there's the initial investment in
doing graphics and AI and so forth that's still a blocker)

Anyway, there's pretty clearly _already_ a market for
Linux based small business accounting stuff; have a look at
http://www.jimohalloran.com/2004/04/22/open-source-accounting-apps/ eg.
Just being able to give someone a ratty old computer, a free Linux DVD and
say "this is all you need for computer equipment for your new business!"
would be amazingly awesome.

Has anyone looked at TurboCASH? I'd never heard of it before.

Cheers,
aj

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