Why choose proprietary languages?

I am trying to figure this out. I am now supposed to be supporting a web application that is on our local intranet. It is made by one of our suppliers and although it is supposed to be a client management system its real purpose it to sell more of their product. As a free software lover I use firefox for web browsing and I was hoping to just use firefox to administer this website. But they use VBScript to do some of the work on the website. VBScript only works in Internet Explorer so I can’t use linux to use.

Now I know about ies4linux, and PlayOnLinux and stuff like this. But they suck and don’t work 90% of the time.

So this may be something beyond my brains ability to understand but, if you want to sell more product wouldn’t it make sense to use technologies that everyone can access? Why limit your demographic at all?

Maybe another way that open is ultimately better.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under General . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Why choose proprietary languages?”

  1. Doran "Fozz" Barton Says:
    October 5th, 2009 at 4:23 am

    It's not just Linux users. Mac users would be left out in the cold as well. That might be something to tell the vendor. Combined, Mac and Linux users make a small but significant piece of the pie.

  2. Will Smith Says:
    November 1st, 2009 at 6:27 pm

    @fozz:
    I agree with you. They are cutting off an 11% slice of the pie. But when I asked them about it they said that they had to pick something to support and they picked IE and Windows.

    My ultimate thought would be to pick supporting open and transferable standards. But hey, that is just me right.

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