Breaking the Rules of Commercial Software Development.notes
Thursday, March 24, 2005
TITLE OF PAPER: Breaking the Rules of Commercial Software Development
URL OF PRESENTATION: _URL_of_powerpoint_presentation_
PRESENTED BY: John Pinner
REPRESENTING: Clockwork Software Systems
CONFERENCE: PyCon 2005
DATE: Thursday, March 24, 2005
LOCATION: GWU Cafritz Conference Center, Grand Ballroom
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REAL-TIME NOTES / ANNOTATIONS OF THE PAPER:
{If you've contributed, add your name, e-mail & URL at the bottom}
(you're missing interesting factoids about these nutty bakers and their
gigantor computer for payroll. guaranteed 75% accurate)
(The computer, not the factoids)
Target Market
Any size (bakery) Payroll, small (croissant) - large (cakes)
Buisness model
Major income from support
Startup
Training
Day-to-Day support
Shutdown
Support through whole life of payroll
Current Payroll Software is really restricting and money grubbing
Internet filing of payroll -- required now by UK
Actually sold net filing engine to windows payroll software maker
Supply 'Payroll in a Box'
Linux machine
Where we broke the rules
No restrictions as in proprietary software
Selling support and trust, not licenses
Software Demo
Based on PyQt
Starts with Big box of buttons -- people actually like this better than
menus, although it doesn't look so great (but they do have a nice website)
(something to do, i speculate wildly, with the way people use/build spatial
memory)
They released something without testing it as a whole--what fun.
Named Thyme because it's not Sage, which is a major UK payroll system
Languages -
C - their pedant programmer is better at C than Python, so that's what
the core calculation engine is in
GUI - Qt, PyQt, and Qt Designer
Some sort of pretty neat table-editing window generator -- takes table defn and
outputs Qt XML ui file
Q&A
Q: Security issues with having the source
A: The software is only accredited by Inland Revenue if it is provided by them --
so if somebody downloads it it's not an accredited version (and thus not legal to
file with, I guess)
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REFERENCES: {as documents / sites are referenced add them below}
http://www.python.org/pycon/2005/papers/43/paythyme_pycon/paythyme_slides.html
http://www.paythyme.com/
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