[scribus] Is Linux/Scribus viable? (was New Linux User...)

[Lars O. Grobe]

> <snip!>
>
> Not to split hairs here[1], but CUPS has been around for well over a
> decade. Apple only bought CUPS a year or two ago. A better example
> might be Darwin, the OS X kernel, which, IIRC, is Open Source.
>
>   
Well, if you take away the Aqua interface, I guess 95% of OS X is open 
source... for me it is not much different from any Linux distro, except 
that I sometimes miss a clear modular package-management-like system. 
But even if you would browse the sources of e.g. windows, I am pretty 
sure that you would find lots of open-source originated code. In our 
days, because of networking etc., every system shows big unix 
influences, and unix always based on open source (that is how it was 
ported).

Anyway, about the discussion here, as it relates to scribus (and that is 
the topic of the list)... I think there are simply different concepts of 
using (and getting) software. Those who want to "buy" a license with 
some phone hotline support for a specific time, in a specific budget, 
can live happily with different commercial solutions. But you need a 
budget - I loved Quark (in its earlier versions), but I would have never 
paid that price, and I did not need because others paid for it. So as 
long as I use scribus for private things, it is the only solution 
anyway. If you have a business with either an it department (big 
business) or a local shop doing system administration, set-up, support 
etc, then scribus is great, as you can perfectly adopt it to your needs. 
Meaning that you can track problems easily, add a feature or disable 
another, install it on any platform you want to use (hey - how could you 
ever do something as nice and clean as putting a scribus install on a 
sun server and attach 50 ray clients to it with any commercial 
competitor's software...), combine it and model your own workflow 
environment with open source pieces...

So guys, just choose what you want. If you want to buy software in a 
colorful box, do so, and try to send the comments and complaints you 
post here easily to a commercial vendor - good luck on the phone 
hotline. If you want to use (and that means learn and combine) open 
source, feel free to ask, report bugs, give ideas.

CU Lars.