>>>>>it was not as good for the M$ bottom line as the VB/VS/SQL Server solution which costs about $5000 to start.
>>>>
>>>>$0.00 (Visual Studio Express)
>>>>+ $0.00 (SQL Server Express/MySQL)
>>>>----------
>>>>$0.00
>>>
>>>And how many users on SQL Server Express?
>>
>>ISTR MSDE was throttled by limiting maximum number of simultaneous connections, to 5 or 6 IIRC. Express 2005/2008 seems to have done away with that, instead its limitations are:
>>
>>- One physical CPU (with any number of cores)
>>- 1GB RAM
>>- No single database can exceed 4GB
>>- SQL Agent not available
>>
>>This link claims Express can be suitable for up to 20 users: http://www.devx.com/MicrosoftISV/Article/38728
>>
>>By modern standards those limitations seem fairly severe, but it's still enough power for a lot of small business or light-duty scenarios.
>
>Yes, I was thinking that was like the old MSDE (wasn't that single user when it first came out? - I don't remember it allowing 5 connections). But then I figured maybe they've changed it and Googled it and could see that there didn't seem to be a user limitation (that I could see), but was really unclear on what the limitations were (I figured there must be some). So this is one good thing that competition from MySQL and the like has done. Do you think they would have offered a free version if they didn't feel some heat from those other products? Not a snowball's chance in Hades. But even this would not be enough for most of my clients, so they'd be back to paying for the "real thing." Another issue is that part of my point in this thread - in my first post - was that the current version of VS is being compared to VFP, on which development stopped some time ago. Not really fair. Of course, VS will look better. It's similar here. SQL Express is a recent development - when I posted that about the cost, I was talking about what the pricing was at the time M$ was making the decision - and a conscious decision it was - to kill VFP. At that time, there was no free version of SQL Server.

Sure, DB competition has been a good thing for end-users. It's likely that open-source DBs continue to contribute to the increasing commoditization of databases in general.

It's well and good to try to compare dev tools given similar amounts of resources applied to them, but in the final analysis you have to look at the current state of the art. Fair doesn't really enter into it.

I think MS's practice of frequently changing course on their technology focus and related best practices is very hard on small/independent developers. With VFP we've enjoyed general compatibility across all versions for something like 15+ years. Now many of us need to learn new stuff, and eat the loss of productivity while we do so. This isn't news to most non-VFP MS developers, I can almost hear them muttering "grow up" :-/

Open-source dev tools have some attractions but are not a holy grail, either. Suppose you decide to develop in something like Ruby on Rails. Sure, it's open source, if the RoR team moves the product in a direction you don't want to go, you don't have to follow. You could even fork the code. But, realistically, not a lot of people have the skills to do that sort of thing.

While on the topic of open source, have you seen any open-source report writers?