Concerns with choosing a free development platform for industrial use

Hi,
There are concerns at my company over the notion of using free applications (Apex and 10g Express) to meet our needs, since they are both free. Both applications can clearly handle our database that may grow to at most 10,000 records in 10 years.
The most common concern is that Oracle may charge for one or both of these applications in the future.
Has anyone else had issues convincing others that Apex is a good choice?
What other concerns were brought up and how were they dealt with?
I am not in our IT department so computer-related suggestions are a tough sell in the first place.
From my perspective, even if we continued to use the current version of Apex and 10g Express our future needs would be met. The Oracle forums provide a great deal of support for both products. It still seems difficult to rationalize however. The old saying “nothing is free” comes to mind. To make matters worse, I have had several individuals respond to the mention of the name Oracle with statements like “they are far too expensive.”
Regards,
David

Hi David,
I understand the argument...however surely there are equally valid counter-arguments to that -
1) The logic used would say that your company would be much happier about using the same tool now if they had to pay for it rather than not have to pay for it.
2) I believe there has never been a precedent of Oracle trying to charge people retrospectively for a tool that was initially free but then became 'pay-for' afterwards. In other words, use it for free today, sure anything might happen in 5 years time, but until then enjoy the product.
3) If Oracle dropped APEX tomorrow that would still not 'break' any of the applications that you have already developed. If Oracle drops APEX in 5 years time, think how productive you could be between then and now.
There are countless shops out there still running 'business critical systems' on de-supported hardware and/or desupported software. Remember just because something has been de-supported isn't the same as it stops working (although sure, you'll need a plan around that).
If your company is trying to get some sort of guarantee that APEX will be around in X years time, then I think they're going to be out-of-luck. No company can really guarantee a statement like that in practical terms...even with the best will in the world, anything can happen in those sort of timescales.
I'd say use the best tool for the job right now and for the immediate future, predicting longer term than that is an impossible task (and personally I think anything who knows otherwise should send me next weeks lottery numbers).
Also bear in mind that Oracle does have a precedent of giving their customers a lot of advance notice before de-supporting a product. If you take a walk through Metalink you could probably do the statistics on what that period is (or perhaps it's documented somewhere?).
John.
http://jes.blogs.shellprompt.net
http://apex-evangelists.com

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Your question is not an uncommon one. However, my opinion is that which product or technology you use for an application should not be solely based on what is "cool" today. Some of today's most popular product may not be able to do what you need them to do or at least may not allow you to do it easily. You need to use a product and/or technology which falls into this group:
1. Does the product/technology offer the features our application will need?
2. Does the product/technology scale to the level we need? Both in user base and application size?
3. Does the product/technology offer the level of security we need?
4. Does the product/technology fall in line with our development team's skill set?
5. Does the product/technology fall in our budget?
Whether you are speaking of an Oracle product or competitor's product, all have their advantages and disadvantages.
The views expressed in this posting are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.
.................................................................................................................................

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Concerns with choosing a free development platform for industrial use

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