I am sorry you took my questions differently, I didn't mean to imply you didn't.  I knew you gave him full credit right up front and that you "only" (as you put it) made a front end GUI for a command line project.  I got from your original statements everything you said (well except the part about whether or not the original was packaged in with your GUI or if they were separate).  I just meant that since you did such a nice job and he has that package already, that DoCo members aren't the only ones who might want it and that Hector might want to host the GUI on his SourceForge site to make his program easier to use. 

I'm advising my business clients not to buy any app they will use in their business from an app store where the owner of the store can kill apps already purchased. No business in their right mind should want any applications -- especially applications that are or might become "business critical" -- that someone can kill switch at any time. That's like giving someone a kill switch for your business. I really don't think Microsoft has thought a lot of this stuff through given that a lot of their income comes from sales to businesses.

-rssapphire (December 25, 2011, 07:25 PM)

I love this quote because it DEFINES my problem with "cloud computing".  My only caveat is that it should be person instead of business.  :Thmbsup:

Point is, if Microsoft goes that route, it's far easier for enterprise customers to go along than it is for them to retool over to a new OS and a new set of core applications. Especially since Microsoft has already announced plans to allow big corporate users to run what amounts to their own app store in-house.

-40hz (December 26, 2011, 06:30 AM)

I have to agree here, primarily because of the last statement.  If they are allowed to "own" their own app store and download the bits (not unlike the current licensing scheme they are allowed to implement), then there is no need for them to worry much about it.  IT already is the stop-light for software distribution, this is just another tool to make it easier for IT to do what it already does.

The problem with the argument about custom software is two-fold in my opinion.  First off, custom is expensive.  It costs a lot to develop and orders of magnitude more to maintain.  Moreover the knowledge and experiences gained cannot and will not ever be fully captured.  Documentation only takes you so far.  I work on a mainframe that was developed in-house in the 80's.  Today we have 2nd and in some cases 3rd generation personnel working on these systems.  Many times, they don't even know what it is doing, and even if they do, they don't know all the details.  As often as not, if an obscure or rarely failing piece fails to work, they try restarting it.  If it truly is broke, they apply patches that are essentially error catches that tell it how to function now, because they don't know how to fix the original code or in some cases even where that code resides.

The second problem with the argument is that more often than not (due to time & other cost considerations) the "custom" code is little more than glue-scripts that exchange data between two packages.  It is rare that any software is fully customized, even in large corporations, unless there is no other alternative or it IS the product.  Can it be done?  Of course.  Will it be done?  Only if there is NO other reasonable solution.

If you can structure entire OS's into tabs using virtualization, I can't imagine it being any more difficult (and quite a bit less) to create a generic tabbing window that you can open individual apps within.  It may not be the most efficient or best way to do it, but it would certainly fulfill the need and is exactly what I think Kalos was after. Windows already enforces the one app per window, so you would just need to add a tab-like extention that can be yet another view just like tile, full screen, or cascade.  Not saying it is easy, but certainly not as hard as you seem to make it out to be either.