Linux Blog

Guest Post From Davis Miller

Score! a HUGE victory for Linux gaming in 2013! Ryan Gordon confirmed via Twitter that “Dungeon Defenders is an Unreal Engine 3 game on Linux, and it’s the first thing I’ve shipped with SDL 2.0!” The launch of Humble Indie Bundle 7 is a tower defense and action oriented role playing game that was originally designed and released for the standard PC in 2011. Though it began as a development for Unreal Engine 3, it now has a native Linux port.

The reality of Linux gaming has been in question for years. Interested parties jump in, and then jump out. Plagued by technical and developmental problems, Linux gaming technology has taken nothing more than baby steps over the years. The recent strides leading up to the shipment of a Linux ported games have happened incredibly fast, with no signs of slowing in the near future. (Read on …)

When a company needs a piece of software there is lots of open source software available that may suit their needs. But what happens when there isn’t?
Lets take a look employee performance evaluation software (like this) for example. To build a full featured business supporting application like this is no easy task. Lets weigh in the options:

Build It
There is always the option to build software, depending on the complexity this option can cost a lot of money. You need to either build from scratch, use a framework or modify an existing open source project. Some corporations have the funds for hardware, a development team, system administrators and support team. Those that dont are pretty much left with the buy or cloud solutions.

Buy it
If building isn’t an option due to cost another is to buy. Software support and hardware are sometimes additional costs buying is a viable option depending on the application. What is often the case for small to medium sized companies, a piece software will not feature what they need, while having 90% of everything else. This can lead to leaving critical business functions out, or even a hodgepodge of multiple versions of software that do the same thing.

Cloud / hosted solitions.
For certain applications “heading to the cloud” can be a smart way to go. Not having in house hardware to inventory and maintain is one benefit, and access from multiple locations is another. With the vendors providing support. One concern is security, although this is the same with tbe build/buy options that is often overlooked.

While off the shelf products may exist there are still expenses where choosing the hosted solution may turn out more cost effective.