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