Question: Will the future Kexi Demo versions for MS Windows be limited, e.g. by number of tables supported or number of rows?
Answer: Yes. If you are not comfortable with this you are free to choose one of three options (ordered from the simplest to the hardest):
- Buy the commercial Kexi version with technical support and updates. This secure further development of the application, keeping its top quality and also has good influence on the quality of Linux and Unix versions, since the design and the computer source code is shared. Technical support guarantees you will get answers and solutions for your problems from the core developers before any user of the free version.
- Use Kexi on platforms like Linux or FreeBSD (or, in the future on MacOS X) where it's full version is provided free as in "free beer". We believe this option eventually will be a must for many computers in the world, as Linux/Unix desktop rapidly evolves for many software usage scenarios. Please consider this path, as we have decided to promote it by providing the free fully functional version there, without a risk for stopping the development at some point.
- Build Kexi yourself on MS Windows. You can build your MS Windows Version with non-free tools but this will probably exceed the costs of the commercial version by a factor of 40 or so. And include the cost of developer's time. The tools include commercial Qt license, MS Visual C++ 7.x, and various MS Windows versions to test the final product.
On the other hand, we have contributed more than one year of commercial development workforce to making KDE (http://www.kde.org) libraries v3 available for free on MS Windows, this one part can be obtained for free from the KDE project. But again, mentioned paid tools are needed.
Having this last option you have a guarantee better than with any commercial product, that in case you are not satisfied with the commercial offering, you can either build your own custom version of the software on any of the supported platforms or switch to other platform as noted in the point 2.
Having said that, it is possible that future version of Kexi for MS Windows will be free when an appropriate refund for its development and investment can be found. For now the resources are not free.
OpenOffice Software, commercial vendor of Kexi
