[K12OSN] IE requirement

[Petre Scheie]

Tell your developers that rather than 'standardizing' on IE, they should code to 
W3C (www.w3c.org) standards.  That way you're not subjugating yourselves to the 
whims of any one vendor, even an open-source one.  You might point out that the 
only reason the web caught on so quickly was because it *didn't* require users 
to have one brand of software, it just required software (a browser) written to 
those public, non-proprietary standards.  Matter of fact, in the '80s, what you 
had WAS online services that required you to use their client and only their 
client.  And guess what, those services didn't interoperate with each other 
because the vendors wanted to keep you in their system.  Writing to proprietary 
specs is very easy to get into--vendors go to great pains to make it that way. 
By that same token, they make it very difficult to get out of those proprietary 
way of doing things, which is good for them but bad for you.

Tell them to look at is this way: If MS's file formats for Word, Excel, etc., 
were completely open, such that OpenOffice.org could access them through 
published specs rather than reverse engineering the format, MOST people, 
businesses, and organizations could switch and save themselves a ton of money. 
But since those formats are proprietary, switching would be difficult for many. 
That's what keeps people in MS land.  Compare this to, say, ftp, where the 
particular client doesn't matter to the server you connect to.  You can switch 
ftp clients if you ever want to, quite easily.  What your developers are 
proposing is locking themselves into technology that will be difficult to get 
out of, and locking themselves out of new developments in Web technology that 
inevitably will be coming down the road.

(I run into the same mentality at my employer.  Sheesh.  Don't these people know 
anything of computing history of the past forty years, or even ten years?)

</rant>

As to your original question, the current version of CrossOver Office, 3.0, does 
a pretty good job of running IE, including automatically downloading and 
installing IE 6, whcih then seems to run quite well on Linux.  I've been testing 
it here in my office, where some of our internal websites work only with IE. 
The latest CXO release so far has had no problems, whereas the previous 2.x 
version mostly worked but broke on some javascript used on our sites.  CXO also 
works well in a LTSP environment, as the folks as CrossOver are big proponents 
of it.  Full disclosure: The president of CodeWeavers is a friend of mine, but 
mostly that just means I follow their activities closely.

Petre

pnakashi at k12.hi.us wrote:
>>If you 
>>can, you should do what you can to get whoever is responsible to 
>>reconsider this decision.
>>-- 
>>Shahms E. King
> 
> 
> I think we're coming to that conclusion also. The question is can he be convinced?
> I fear "This website certified to run on IE only" is fast becoming M$'s killer weapon against OSS.
> --Peter
> 
> 
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