Dave, although it's not necessary to have proprietary compatibility to be a good piece of soft, the programs that we have all suggested have a great deal of shared formats for you to work between Win and Linux the gimp handles: File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others Load, display, convert, save to many file formats SVG path import/export OpenOffice Handles it's own format, plus .doc, .xls, .ppt and all the other M$ formats, in most of their versions. I personally use OOo in windows and linux and the only problem that I'm aware of it's with the formulas written in OOo, which don't appear correctly on M$ (although the formulas written in M$ are read by OOo). Generally speaking, most of the GPL soft would have at least one kind of output that is universal in it's final form. I can't guarantee that you could work a little bit on GPL, change to proprietary and then come back again to GPL with 100% compatibility, but you could always have a product that would be readable in a platform-independent format. Greetings -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20051205/00854a20/attachment.htm