On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 5:45 PM, David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote:
is there really still a market for commercially-licensed installable software packages? The set of things that cannot be delivered via the web, and are not available as Free/Open Source is ever-shrinking.
I agree with the later, but for the folks that have traditionally made a market in the former (think commercial HPC - geo science, mech-e cad, financial, chemistry, etc..) - they have codes [often in Fortran] and years and year of data that those codes have been used to create an validate.
Ever-shrinking is right, but those folks have very valuable (billions of dollars) invested in that data and their businesses behind them. The code they use is proprietary and closed.
As I said in another message, the test matrix for the folks that develop that code got unwieldy.
Containers is the only alternative I have seen so far that might solve this, but .... that same folks don't like no stinking OS between their app and the HW, so using virtualization technology to solve a problem is usually a no-no.