>You do pay license fees for commercial applications developed with MySQL, no? Of course, you could substitue a "free" backend, such as ProgressSQL pretty easily, so maybe the backend cost was not a good example.

We signed a company-wide agreement with MySQL - the cost of the license to the end-user is nothing. However, you are right, there are other SQL data-engines that could be used, cost free.

>Infrastructure requirements for .NET apps are considerably higher than, say, for VFP apps

I hear this but I wonder. Are you saying that people are still using VFP applications and VFP app-vendors are still targeting Windows 95/98 implementations? Like I said, we still target and support Win2K machines with .NET. If VFP apps are running on earlier versions of Windows than Win2K, then things must be pretty bad. As each version of VFP was released, in general terms, the worse became its performance. My last major VFP "gig" was using P4 machines and Win2K/WinXP. Older versions of Windows and slower PCs just didn't cut the mustard, even with VFP. So, Win2K+, I don't buy into the fact that .NET has any higher requirements than VFP. In fact, at my last job, whilst we redeveloped the VFP application in .NET, our users had the .NET version of the old VFP system and old VFP system itself running quite happily on the same machine over Win2K and WinXP.


>although at least in countries like the U.S. and U.K. this is becoming a moot point, as most everyone keeps updating their computers quite frequently. In many other countries, however, it is a different story (as many UT members from the Middle East, Central & South America, etc. can surely agree).

Obviously Pertti, I only know my own reality and that is based on the UK market-place. I defer to your experience outside of the UK.

Thanks for your insights and for managing to conduct a sensible discussion, irrespective of whether we actually agree with each other or not :)

Cheers,