[Web-SIG] The importance of deploying Python-based web apps on Windows (was: Re: [Proposal] "website" and first-level conf)

[Chris Withers]

Sidnei da Silva wrote:
> I seriously hope you are kidding.
> 
> Unfortunately that's not possible. A lot of people, specially when
> evaluating open-source projects, have their first contact with the
> software through the Windows platform. To quote some numbers, the
> Plone Installer for Windows has roughly 3x more downloads than any of
> the second most download package [1].
> 
> Now, I see clearly two options for open-source projects: have a
> Windows story and increase your downloads by X%, where X can be a
> number between 50-300 *wink*, or not have a Windows story and relying
> on the *nix crowd to be the sole consumers of your software.
> 
> When you talk to a big organization that is already deploying their
> applications on the Windows platform what story you want to tell them?
> 'Oh, and by the way, all your investment on Windows software, you will
> have to throw all that away if you want to use our software'. Good
> luck with that.
> 
> I think that it's pretty important that Python-based web apps have as
> good of a story on Windows as it has in other fields (pywin32 comes to
> mind) but feel free to disagree.
> 
> Sorry for the rant.

No, and this really deserves saying again...

Windows isn't going to vanish any time soon, and we're not going to help 
it vanish any quicker by head-in-sand'ing it's existence...

cheers,

Chris

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