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Most industry experts and corporate users believe that Linux is the closest rival to Microsoft in terms of operating system functionality. At the same time, because of its open-source code and reliability, Linux is used by an increasing number of software vendors and corporate users for more mission critical applications.
There is also an increasing number of successful and popular application software vendors like SugarCRM that offer some of its products as open-source downloads. This is a good indicator that the software business is also branching off towards the SSaS doctrine: Software Sold as Service. Application software may one day be offered to end users as a service chargeable by period or by transaction, with or without services.
We have strong belief in the possibilities of open-source software, and we have been preparing the Oasis software for development towards SSaS. As soon as the end user demand for this is sufficient, our products and our team will be ready too.
Without the open-source benefits provided by Linux and the PostgreSQL database, we are unlikely to make the investment to prepare ourselves as we cannot be too sure about the major changes of operating system software and databases software architecture. Few can make strategic investments with confidence when the future is not definite and clear.
With open–source technologies, however, we always know that the platform that we have invested in is not going to be outdated based on the commercial decisions, like product life cycle concept, of any specific vendor.
More and more critical industries, such as government, telecommunication companies, data centres, and financial sectors, are migrating towards Linux both for cost and reliability reasons. For successful Linux deployment in the real corporate environment, please refer to the section Linux Global Success.
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