Last year I worked on integrating some statistics code with a GIS. After looking at as many open-source cross-platform GIS as I could find, I got stuck with OpenEV. It did the job - just. Its big attraction for me was the built-in python scripting and API - a python script could create new menu items, Gtk dialogs, access map data, create new layers and so on.

My code had to talk to R, a statistics package (www.r-project.org). I did it using Rserve - in this way, R opens a socket on localhost and listens for requests. There were no python bindings for Rserve so I dissected the protocol and wrote my own. Job pretty much done.

Then late last year I upgraded my desktop box to Ubuntu (from RH8). Upgrade time for R, OpenEV, python and so on. Plus the realisation that this code would all have to run on Windows, by non-geeks, in remote villages in Africa.