Re: Equivalent products to SQR?

[cshelton <cshelton@INDIANA.EDU>]

I'd suggest looking at perl.  I've been working with both sqr and perl for
about 4 years now. Even though perl might have a slightly steeper learning
curve than sqr, it can do everything that I know that sqr can do and a
whole lot more.

Try starting at www.perl.com and www.perl.org for researching perl.  In my
experience, support for perl is significantly better than with sqr,
especially if you are able to search on the net for answers.

The two biggest issues that I see in favor of perl over sqr are total cost
of ownership and control of software.  For the cost of one SQR license,
you can buy quite a library of perl books, as well as attend training
sessions or even bring in an on-site firm to train people in perl.  Since
perl is open source software, you don't have to pay any organization for
the right to use it.

Eric Scott Raymond described the control issue well, in his recent talks
about this issue:

"An executive who allows his company to becomes dependent on software he
is not allowed to see inside, let alone change, has lost control of his
business, and is on the wrong side of a monopoly relationship with a
vendor who can thereby control his business. With open source, the
executive is in control, and nobody can take that away. "
        - Eric Scott Raymond, "Meme Hacking for Fun and Profit"

Chris Shelton

On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, Chris Gin wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We have been forced into looking at replacing SQR due to the change in the
> licencing structure by Brio. Currently we run SQR on Unix and we're looking
> at migrating to an NT environment.
>
> Are there any products out there that even come close to SQR in terms of
> functionality?
>
> The reason we're looking at using something else is because we're told that
> the cost of a user licence is now based on the power of the machine it's
> running on. For us, this means an increase of 1000% which is ridiculous.
>
> Thanks,
> Chris
>
>