If Coca Cola can run their own custom software in a distribution center, what's to stop any other company in the world?

Cost. Custom in house software is very expensive compared to something off the shelf for a small business. Coca Cola probably has paid millions of dollars in developer costs for custom software. Their developers probably average over $50,000/year so if it takes 1 developer year to write the software that is a $50,000 piece of software. But wait, a company Coca Cola's size won't just send a developer on their merry way to write software for them, they need a project manager, testers, and many meetings to determine how that software should work. They need people in house to provide first level support for the software. Each year they'll find X new features they want. Keeping all of those people on staff to maintain custom software is not cheap.

It isn't like *nix lacks database programs, or anything else. Find something that comes close to what you need, have your IT staff modify to suit your needs, and run with it. No more licensing fees, no more forced upgrades, nada.

Even among some of the most ardent supports of Open Source you'll find people that will tell you, your business may hit a point where it needs Oracle or DB2 or a TerraData system to support what you are doing.

A 10 minute change? That is laughable estimate.

Maybe 10 minutes of coding time, but don't forget all the time to develop a project plan, agree to a timetable (with all affected departments in the government), write the requirements, have the stakeholder approve the requirements (this will take at least a week with more than one meeting), write the technical specification for the change, design a test plan, write your unit tests (if they don't already exist), make the code change, deploy the code to a test environment, fix any bugs that may come up that are production bugs (but the testers insist they need to be fixed for this release), get sign off from the stakeholder and deploy to a production environment.

10 minutes my ass. That's just as bad as you assuming it would take 6 months of coding work to make the change in COBOL.

I've worked with plenty of DBAs who refuse to use an auto-increment field as the primary key. It makes migration between databases quite difficult when you don't have admin privileges and need to move data from production to a test environment. You can't turn off the default value for the field and then your foreign key entries don't match the PK on the other table. Its more of a hassle than a help in some cases.

He is the President Elect and he has an office. Things that come from it are from the office of the President Elect

-water