Victor Odhner wrote:

> Alexander Henry wrote:
> > Ah, an engineering application.  Engineers are used to keeping old
>  > technology lying around, and I understand why.  Once you have
>  > something that gets the job done, why fix it?
>
> It goes deeper than that.  A lot of packages in areas such as
> CAD and mapping are very well established under Microsoft,
> and there is no credible competition -- at least not in the
> consciousness of most shops.  I expect that will be changing
> over the next 5 - 10 years, but it'll take some aggressive work.
>
> For example, Autocad is a standard, and Windows is where it's at.
> In fact, of course, something like Autocad is expensive enough
> that the OS licensing is a minor addition.  Prominent mapping
> applications are deeply intertwingled with DLLs and Visual Basic.
> (Remember we don't even have a complete answer for the popular
> money-management programs yet!)
>
> Of course WINE and VMWare may come to accommodate a lot of these
> most popular packages, but again don't expect 100% replacement
> too soon.

um..  Google CAD with "I'm feeling lucky" and you get:
 http://www.freelists.org/webpage/cad-linux