>>Now how do you think that's gonna go dude? You think Contractor A is going to walk away with the deal? Hell no - he will be laughed right out the door.
>
>Actually, he'll never get in that door.
>
>The default platform today, like it or not, is the browser and the default data and development tools are open source.
>Lots of ASP.net work out there, for sure, but the direction is clearly open source.
>Would Facebook exist if Mark had had to buy SQL Server licenses?

That's true. And on top of that, clients are becoming more tech-savvy these days too and there is more chance of them actually caring about such things. In 1995 they didn't really seem to give a crap if it was VFP or VB or VC++ or Delphi or whatever and often didn't know one from the other anyway. Now they seem take notice of this more...and they want to see an app that looks like every other app they use and they tend to be browser apps.