It reminds of teenage girls and their old boyfriends: they don't want him but they don't want anyone else to have him either.



>I'm very saddened by today's official news. I spent many years using VFP for products I built, and for custom development projects (for both small and medium size companies). The aspect that most impressed me about VFP, was that I could easily build data intensive stand-alone applications, and the ease with which I could manipulate data and drive my applications with that data. I didn't need to use several different products to build an application. VFP could handle it all, and I could easily package and distribute it, and keep the costs down for my clients (since they didn't need to go out and buy an expensive backend database server or other add-ons). I'm not aware of anything else out there that can accomplish this in such an efficient and effective manner. Thus, the eventual end of VFP seems like a great loss to the development community! Yes, I realize that VFP will still be around for many years, but I personally cannot afford to risk anymore of my time using a product that will
>become unsupported and maybe obsolete after 2015. There is no way of knowing if VFP will be compatible with future versions of Windows and the future upgrades of other products.
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>In my opinion, Microsoft's decision to end the continued evolution of VFP, further supports the advantage of using open source systems over commercial products. With open source, the "core" software is being evolved by a community of developers with an interest in continuously evolving and fine tuning the core product. There are no guarantees that an open source product will last forever, but the discontinuation of an open source product is usually decided by technology trends and user support, rather than product line/marketing strategy and cost/profit concerns. In the case of VFP, there is a very sizable community of developers who support the product and who would continue heavily utilizing the product throughout their career. There is no technical reason why VFP could not continue to evolve and remain compatible with current trends.
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>VFP is a very unique product that provides very effective solutions for many different scenarios, and much more efficiently than other products! In my opinion, a VERY useful product/development tool is being gradually discontinued, but not because there are better alternatives to what VFP does best. The gradual discontinuation of VFP does not seem to be in the best interest of the development community. Yes, Sedna may help prolong the life of VFP in the short-term, but the reality is that as we move towards 2015, a large proportion of VFP developers will discontinue creating anything new using VFP. Nobody knows if VFP will be compatible with anything beyond Vista or with future changes of any of Microsoft's other products (.Net, SQL Server, MS Office, etc). Considering human nature, it is a good bet that today's news is going to rapidly hasten the end of VFP usage in the development and consumer community.
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>In my opinion, Microsoft should either sell VFP to another company willing to continue the product line, or make the entire VFP source code publicly available to the development community. In other words, give it to the community as a complete open source system, and allow the development community to decide the future of this product (including its core and add-ons). Microsoft has a right to do what is best for it's marketing and cost/profitability concerns, but I also think that they have a responsibility to the development community too. If they don't want to keep VFP in their product line, then that is their right. However, I think that they should either let another company continue its development, or let the community decide what to do with it (especially since a large community of developers find VFP to be extremely powerful and effective for various application scenarios).
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>I think it is a tragedy that such a very powerful and effective product is being gradually taken away from all of us, and that we have very little say in the matter. In my opinion, this is a great loss to the development community.
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>Dave