Re:Burlington Coat Factory (Score 1)

Linux needs more than just cash register tools to be a functional business system It's great as a scientific platform, but it's positively hair-raising as a biz platform. We've had a paralle Linux network running in our offices for about a year (which we use for e-mail), but it's a pretty scary system for keeping valuable biz data. Existing Linux biz software has lots of ODBC and CORBA and ORACLE, but that stuff is hugely impractical for small businesses. It won't link to older systems. It needs specialized DBA technicians and lots of dedicated servers. It often won't read or write DBF files, or if it does, it won't read the indexes. Linux blows up the whole enterprise if the hardware flakes out (like a shaky power supply will take out the hard-drives - with _NO_ chance of data recovery. Therefore, you must invest heavily in redundancy and back-up systems. The Burlington Coat Factory guys most likely had to write their own software (not cheap). We're still investigating the expansion of our Linux experiment, and we're having some success, but it requires writing a lot of very complicated software. And it can't be Linux-only software; it must be DOS and Windows compatible. This means it must be a scripted or run-time implementation so the same scripts can be run on any platform. The data format? Is there any other choice for small business than DBF?