[LUAU] FOSS alternatives to proprietary software

[Julian Yap]

--- Hawaii Linux Institute <wp at hawaiilinux.us> wrote:
> Let's not forget that, as we have discussed in separate
> threads, for 
> those Windows apps that we are ready to move from, there is
> always the 
> alternative of using VMWare (server or player) to run them
> under a 
> virtualized environment.  Wayne

I see VMWare as a last resort.  There's the VMWare license as
well as the Windows license.  It's not a FOSS alternative. 
Using Wine (http://www.winehq.com/) or seeking some other Free
alternative is.

VMWare takes a chunk of your system's RAM (whatever you dedicate
to it), as you know.  Do you normally get a 1GB RAM machine and
dedicate 512MB of RAM to the Windows virtual machine?  Well,
these days 512MB of RAM is arguably the minimum for business
computing for workstations running Windows XP.

If you focus your energies to eliminating that need to chunk of
512MB of RAM, then you'll have a compelling solution.  You'll
even have enough resources to run a Samba server *sarcasm*. 
BTW, I _really don't understand why you disregarded the solution
I presented to your earlier question.  As Jim has asked, you'll
need to elaborate.

If I was a manager and you showed me a machine running Linux,
with VMWare running Windows and applications running on
Windows...  I'd say, 'OK, so why are you running Linux again?'

- Julian