>>>As for open-source, while free. In general, (and I know there are exceptions), it does not mean its cheaper, more secure, of more quality or future >proof.
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>>I doubt you will get many open source people to agree with that statement.
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>Of course not, or else they would not be called 'open source people'.
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>>Even with the latest breach with equifax the open source guys had the fix months in advance. I think it is true that open source projects are in general more secure.
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>Most products are secure by the fact they are not a (significant) target for hackers. As soon as it gets traction problems might surface. (Forgot the name of that folder/disk encryption software that got replaced by bitlocker).
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>>This is specially true with the large projects. But I doubt that is your real issue with open source. Making the change to open source is not very easy. Windows only recently started using open source. So many of the tools I used don't really fit in with the open source world. But I note the MS is moving very quickly with open source. VS is now using electron. Most web stuff is now in the Angular, react world. In fact MS is even providing classes on the use of those products.
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>I was involved with a MySQL project, but it was a real dissapointment. Not only was it hard to get through all kinds of different gotchas with MySQL, I was surprised that there are different backend implementations with different aspects to take care of. I needed some tools to manage the MySQL database on a website but I found no way to profile the database of what VFP was sending to MySQL as I has some serious problems in getting a realiable behaviour (updates randomly failing without knowing what the hell was going on). Spend tenths of hours to get help on the issue, but only wasted my time. So for me, give me MSSQL over MySQL any day of the week.
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>In general I'm undershelmed with the quality of tools available in the opensource world as far as I explored. There are exceptions, of course but it does not take away the feeling that I'd rather pay a few bucks for software that I know works well and saving a hell lot of time productivity wise.
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>I fully realise that part of it is because changing tools/software in general is a pain and a learning process, but I'm convinced that it is only part of it.
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>>In my case I have been using Vue.js, Node.js, and Electron for desktop apps. I believe, I will soon move over to Vue.js and Node.js for the web soon - but I currently use Django (python). The old statements that web apps can't do what desktop apps can do is quickly going away. Getting to that USB port or any other devices on the computer is now possible. Having offline solutions are also possible. Is the web there - doubtful - but it's getting closer daily.
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>The web < > open source. Two different things. Im my case I have no problem in paying for webcontrols or other plugins if they save time and are rocksolid. I'm not trying to be pennywise - poundfoolish.
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>>BTW IMO mobile apps for data entry are terrible even though I have been doing them for the last 5 five years - that includes tablets!
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>I fullheartly agree with that statement.
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>>Johnf

During the mid 1980's, while I was managing a huge Wall Street IT shop some of my people posed to me a choice they had surfaced.
Choice A - COBOL/CICS/MVS, etc - lots of CPU resources and about $250K for the package.
Choice B- DBaseI - Wang CPM, minimal CPU resources and about $2.500 for the package.
All of the traditional arguments - breadth of support - proven track record, blah, blah, blah favored choice A.

Mr. Frost said it elegantly:


Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.