Max said:
The biggest problem is that it would take a few million dollars and an entire dedicated release cycle to take your money. Unless there are thousands lined up behind you, doesn't make business sense for our company.
I know you said "few" here, and later more specifically stated "two," but two million bucks sounds a little light for the work required to port AD to Linux.
If you figure the average programming team member costs about $100K in salary and benefits per year, with some team members costing less (coders) and some a lot more (one or more analysts/designers/software engineers and a program manager), that only buys 20 person years of effort. A project of this magnitude would probably require five years to reach public beta, so we are looking at only four people working full time on it. If the manager also wore analyst and coder hats, maybe it could be done… but at what risk? By the time the project reached public beta, the Windows AD would have progressed through another five years of upgrades. If the Linux team also tried to stay abreast of the Windows development they might never reach public beta.
On the other hand, maybe throwing twenty people at it could get the job done in only a year. Can Alibre form a quality team that is well-integrated and single-minded enough to guarantee the desired results only a year later? They would have to build a fully functional AD running on a Linux distribution that is interchangeable with the same version of AD running on Windows, which probably cannot be done without decimating the existing Windows team.
There may be a simpler alternative to porting AD to Linux: open source software. Go to this URL
http://sourceforge.net/search/?q=parametric+3D+CAD and you will find at least seventy-six open-source projects for parametric 3D CAD. I haven’t looked at a single one of them yet because I don’t do Linux. I may never do Linux. For all the young bucks and propeller heads out there who believe Linux is the future of CAD design, jump on a Source-Forge project and ride it to victory. They can always use skilled and dedicated talent at Source-Forge.
By the way, PDF Creator, which Alibre distributes with Alibre Design, was and still is a very successful Source-Forge project. And it runs on Windows too.
Hop