This is a very good point. The point about training users to use OpenOffice seems moot when you consider that it might be easier for people to switch to it from Office 03 to Office 2010. You have training overhead either way. Not only this but Go OpenOffice (http://go-oo.org/) and soon LibreOffice claim to offer better spreadsheet compatibility with MS Office. Plans to eliminate Java may help performance issues. If things continue to improve we might soon reach a tipping point where switching to LibreOffice from MS Office will be worth the cost savings and more and more companies will be doing it.

But is MS SQL Server any better? I heard a MySQL rep from Sun comment shortly after the Oracle deal to acquire Sun was announced that it might be Oracle's intent to use MySQL to compete with SQL Server. I don't see any less reason to believe his statements than yours above on the face of it. Innobase, the developer of the InnoDB transactional storage engine for MySQL, was acquired by Oracle some time before Oracle acquired Sun. Maybe Oracle has a higher opinion of MySQL than you do.

Seems like more of a reason for Oracle to keep MySQL going than Java.

I once took a course in JBoss administration that included a section on tuning garbage collection. It convinced me that GC is a bad idea. It may make it easier for programmers but it shifts the burden for efficient memory management into a domain where it doesn't belong. Effective memory management is very sensitive to the design of the application. Shifting it to a generalized facility that runs garbage collection based on the short, medium or long duration of objects is an administrative nightmare. Someone writes an app that goes against the rules configured into the GC and the performance of the whole server suffers. So now we have training classes for Java programmers on how the GC works so they can write more efficient programs. How is that different from teaching C++ programmers a few simple code design disciplines (encapsulation, proper use of auto_ptr, etc.) to minimize memory management problems in their code?

Let them see for themselves. Tell them to hire one of the MS partners to come and convert there systems to MS products. Ask them to get a money back guarantee in writing (which is essentially what they seem to be asking from you for their OSS systems). If they won't give them that, it ought to tell them something. If they do, tell them if they have any regrets later you'll be there to move them back (for a fee, of course).

Does that k_id string at the end of your URL give you a commission for people who sign up for their service using it?