But we should also consider a third theory. Nat Friedman of Ximian (now Novell) explained at the Desktop Linux conference that the highest barrier to Linux adoption is the cost of rewriting applications. This was the conclusion of a consulting firm brought in by the city of Munich to determine whether it should replace Windows with Linux. The consulting firm warned that application migration costs would override the savings in licensing fees, and Microsoft came in with a stunningly low counter-offer. Munich decided to move to Linux anyway, for strategic reasons. But it's a hard decision to make.


It is certainly true that IT shops cannot afford to rewrite all of their applications today to take advantage of Open Source. But they can surely stop the insanity of platform lock, in their current and future development.


Will it mean some retraining and rethinking? Of course. However, it can also mean huge savings in the future and increased business opportunities. Linux nor Windows is going away anytime in the near future. Can your company support customers who use both, or will it be only one and not the other?


How well will your company be able to compete for services and goods, when your customer base might not be able to run that new Visual Basic or DOT.NET application, nor access your services and sales, because you have been shortsided enough to have a "write here, run only here" type of mentality? Do you really want to pay all of those license fees and cost ad-infinitum, or would you like to have more leverage and control on how and where your business IT resources are spent?


These should be the questions that todays IT departments and companies ask, and it is the xplatform developer that can provide the answers.


The reason that this problem has and currently exists, is that there were precious few XPlatform options in the past. That has now changed with the ubiquity of Java, the new comer of Python, and the newer xplatform widget sets (like QT and wxwindows) that are made with Xplatform in mind.


XPlatform development is the key to Linux growth and adoption, but for not for this reason alone. XPlatform development also affords the best potential for expansion in IT savings and freedom, not to mention commercial business venture expansion.