The Lino vision

Collaboration principles

Our dream is an ideal situation where users and developers adhere to the following principles:

  • developing a software application is the common work of both the users and the developers

  • when discussing about how to distribute effort and benefit, both users and the developers should have equal voices.

  • both want their common work to remain usable also for future users and developers

  • both want to share the fruit of their work with others, and benefit from the work of other people

Lino’s design goals

Applications made with Lino:

  • are intuitive to understand for the end user because the developers and the users communicate efficiently.

  • are quick to develop because Lino encourages agile programming, rapid prototyping and short release cycles.

  • are flexible to maintain because Lino uses modern technologies for testing and deployment.

  • are stable as rock once they satisfy your needs because there is no commercial pressure forcing you to upgrade.

  • are easy to share because Lino encourages a modular approach with libraries of highly reusable code.

  • do not try to be sexy because they are optimized for people who will use them for their everyday work. With Lino it takes a few hours before an end user starts loving it, but that love will be deeper and last longer.

Our ultimate vision

Our ultimate vision is that

  • Lino is a standard part of every public IT education programme.

  • Lino is a library of common knowledge about how business is being done efficiently

  • a majority of application developers uses the Lino framework

  • vendor lock-in is legally impossible: the provider isn’t tempted by it, and the user is not afraid of it

Our creed

We are motivated by a common belief:

  • The free world has already an operating system, an office suite, several good frameworks for developing web and desktop applications, and many other projects that are steadily gaining users.

  • But until now there is no sustainably free solution for developing customized database applications. The market for this business is dominated by a few proprietary giants.

  • We believe that the Lino framework has the potential of becoming a solution for this problem.

How Lino is different

Primary target users of Lino applications are organizations who need a customized database application and do not have their own in-house developer. Such organisations are traditionally doomed to agree to some level of vendor lock-in. Lino applications avoid vendor lock-in because both the source code and documentation are published as Sustainably Free Software.

The major advantage of Lino versus other frameworks is that it combines the advantages of do-it-yourself with those of outsourcing. Most parts of your development project become a natural part of your life.

Lino applications are “more reliable than MS-Access for cheaper than SAP”.