"""The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team.""" 1) You keep using

"""The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team.""" 1) You keep using these words: rounding error. I don't think they mean what you think it means. There are startups, and successful ones, that have the tiniest of budgets. People literally survive on ramen and faith. For those kind of companies, the costs are not a rounding error -- and there's often no salary or minimal salary paid to the 3-7 man team initially, while they still have to have some servers and development tools. 2) It's not just the licensing costs. Even for a team with tons of cash that makes them negligible, depending on a stack fully determined by some other company is not a good idea. Startups rewrite stuff all the time, use different technologies when they find out the old doesn't fit nicely enough, etc. You can't be dragged down because you have written all your code in a proprietary stack for each and every component...