GNUe Santaprise

[Peter Sullivan]

I noticed on IRC Jason semi-seriously suggesting a "GNU 
Santaprise" for next Christmas, as a working demo-cum-
publicity thing. This set me thinking...

-----------------------------------------------------------

To: address@hidden
From: address@hidden
Date: 24th December 2004

Apologies for bothering you at what must be one of your 
busiest times of year, but I wanted to confirm the changes
being proposed to the template for Customer Relationship 
Management for your GNU Enterprise implementation, which 
I have agreed by phone with your internal project manager, 
Mr. R. theRedNosedReindeer.

Firstly, we will remove all references to "Customer," 
and replace with "Child." (This means we can still refer 
to the package as CRM, to minimise confusion.)
We will also disable all functionality relating to payment,
sales invoices and credit control, and remove these fields
from the Forms definitions.

We will add a field to the Customer/Child Class Definition 
for Child.Naughty_or_Nice. I know Mr. theRedNosedReindeer wanted 
to store this as a text string, but I feel it would be better 
to store this as a Boolean value. Given the number of 
records you need to maintain in the database, I think storage 
space is likely to be at a premium, even if you do press any 
spare Sony P/S 4 Playstations into service as spares for the 
Beowulf cluster.

Finally, as I explained, under the GPL, you are perfectly 
at liberty to keep the changes we are making for you on a paid
consultancy basis private. However, I would urge you to let me 
release the code changes under the GPL and make them available to 
James Thompson of the GNUe project for his Bespoke Modules Library. 
I appreciate that your business is unique, and that there is 
therefore unlikely to be any practical benefit in releasing the code 
back to the community. However, it would be an important symbolic 
gesture for santa.org as the world's leading "free as in beer" 
organisation to be seen to be supporting "free as in speech" 
software. Let me know what you think.

-- 
A. Consultant

P.S. My daughter asked me to specifically mention that she 
wanted the red My Little CyberPony, not the pink one. Can I 
assume you will be able to action this based on this e-mail, 
or should I raise it as a work order on DCL?
-- 
Peter Sullivan