Guys, I know its terrible. I don't have a choice here. I will explain a little about the project and my role in it... This other student developed an online questionnaire program for use in teacher evaluations. I did not initiate this project or have any part in its design... I wish I had at this point. This last semester I was in a Windows Programming course, and having developed quite a bit of software in .NET I was allowed to work on a variety of projects in place of creating console based Hello, World! demos. The last project I was placed on was this. The project was already considered 'done' when I started working on it, they just wanted me to convert it from a retail database into an open database (the only open source support I have seen at this university...). When I inquired about this terrible design, I was told it was this way so that question numbers could be represented as strings and be kept unique. By this I mean the data could be described as such: "Q1" "Did your teacher give you a better understanding of the subject material?" "bool" "Q1.1" "Yes" "Q1.2" "No" Right, well thats all good until you consider just using an auto-incrementing integer as the primary key to reference things and attributing the question names as being unique. I must also restate that I can NOT change this design, no matter how difficult it is to accept... /sigh. I can still only plead with you folks and your experience on this, because I must get it working. If we were to only consider the varchars as being 10 in lenght (because if someone were to show me a question number 8k long, I would quit programming!). Do you know how I could use this as a foreign key in a constraint statement? If you know for a fact that it will not be possible, tell me so I can try another avenue. And just to pull the sympathy card on my plight, I have to piece together all SQL statements from 50+ lines of : strCmd += "..."; strCmd += "..."; ... strCmd += "..."; and so on and so on. Because putting the SQL statements into an editable format would be out of the question. Thank you for those who have replied thus far, I hope you can help me come to a solution on my problem. Tim

Hello, I am currently porting software for my University from MSSql to MySql. I am having some problems and would really appreciate any help you could give. I am unable to change the core design of the database tables because another student is working on software to process the resulting data, and he is hard coding everything. I have expressed how this is a bad design idea, but to no avail. So I am stuck with the current design. In this design, the tables use a varchar(8000) as a primary key for relating the tables. This is automagically cast into a TEXT field by MySql, and it of course throws the error that a TEXT field as a primary key must have an index. I went ahead and gave indexes to all those text fields and everything on that part works great. However, later in the database creation there are some constraint commands put on these tables that use those TEXT fields as the foreign key, and when it sees that this foreign key is a TEXT field it throws an error that a lenght must be specified. I have no idea (after reading the manual again) how to specify a length in the constraint command. If you know how please let me know, I can post the code if that would help. Thanks Tim Reynolds

Wow, ok. That was great. Thanks. I am going to read up on this, and talk to my lawyer friend. I will let you all know how it goes. :) Thanks. Tim

Ok, thank you Andy. The other IT Person mentioned that we could use a form of the GPL as our license if I were to give him the source. I know that would require him to commit changes back to the source tree, but would that prevent him from using that source in a retail application? Thank you all again. I should be having a meeting with the other company any day here to discuss everything. Tim

Thank you for your reply and input. Both of you. I understand your views on opening the source and I understand the idea of paying for services and not the software. The issue here is, I would not get paid for any services by this company. I can already tell that. They have their own IT/Software guy, who appears competent enough to work with my software without needing me. One of my concerns is that he has stated his intent to develop and market his own Trucking software, and I do not want that software to be a recompiled version of my software. In my eyes I see that being different that what is possible with the GPL. It would not be a community effort to improve and expand my software. It would be one man taking my work and turning it into money for himself. I am very confused right now as to what I need to do. I must say that I am in no way trying to go the "Microsoft" way. I was just thinking of charging them a few hundred dollars for unlimited use of the program. Does that sound unreasonable? Or does that sound like too little? I do not have the time right now to organize up my own 'company' of sorts. Thank you for your replies.

Hello Code Project. I am writing to appeal to the experience of the veterans in the industry here. I am a programmer for a trucking company, while also still in school working towards my undergraduate in Computer Science. This company is very small, and I am the only software/IT person here. As part of my employment contract, I retain ownership of all software I write, source and all. This, as I am told, is not a common thing, and because of this I am now in the position to sell my software for the first time. I have worked on a few projects in the past, mostly games, but I have never sold anything and am a little nervous about the whole ordeal. There is another trucking company in our office building that wishes to buy the software from me, we have had a few meetings now and are progressing along rather smoothly in the whole process. To answer my questions, you will probably need to know a bit about my software. It is nothing amazing; it just basically automates the company. My software interfaces with a SQL database, keeping records of all employees/trucks/trailers and trips the company runs. The software generates all needed reports on the status of the company, including running all payroll and calculating the routing information for the trips. It was written in C# and the SQL server is MySQL. The software is quite stable and I am hard pressed at this point to make it generate an error. I attribute its qualities to the .NET platform, which was a pleasure to work with. My questions are as follows: What should I charge for this software? I have no real idea of its value. How much does custom software usually cost? This is factoring in that tech support is two doors away for them. What kind of licensing system should I use to protect my program? Should I use any at all? They have asked for the source, so that their IT/software person can edit the program to adapt it to run as a Linux web service (I am unsure at this point if MONO supports this yet...). Should I let them have the source code? What should I charge for it, if anything? What kind of licensing system can I use to protect my code? I chose Code Project as the place to ask because I often use this site as a reference. I find it to be the best repository of information around. Normally, I am a quite generous person and would more than likely just give my program to this other company. However, recent financial troubles have left me in a very difficult position and any income I can generate would be very beneficial. I hav