[LarryMade2]

I started business development with dBase II, after a while I was forced due to hardware availabilty to upgrade (CP/M going out of style). we Got Macs. dBase Mac was an expensive joke then finally settled on McMax, that became incompatible with system 7 IIRC then slid on over to FoxBase+/Mac, (which was excellent) until OSX, but the new owners, Microsoft, provided an out, FoxPro (at least till intel), then again they shortly dropped Mac support so that was all moot. All these times nothing was really wrong with the code but I was at the mercy of commercial firms in finding compatible versions, getting licenses and having just basic long term support. Most other solutions were either expensive or lock-in to a platform, and from experience no better guarantee of longevity of the platform.

So I went open source - with a LAMP stack - if I want to run old versions there's no problem, maybe with hardware - but that also isn't as big a factor. No worries on selecting client compatibility as it is web based (have had to tweak based on HTML/Browser revisions, but nothing that really broke beyond fixing). Every component was free (enough) for what I was doing, and it pretty much just worked. I feel I had wisely steered clear of Filemaker Pro, Access, Cloudbase, Panorama, Visual Basic, or any other platform where I had to plug in a key and/or ask permission in order to install/use it. I was happy, staff was happy... and still are. Never looked back since.

.Net and other MS technology just reminds me of the struggles of the past added with new licensing schemes and more intricate lock-in. So I prefer to ignore it. If I was going to do local machine development instead of web based Python would be the direction I'd go.