It's interesting to me that although there have been several mentions of the possibility of MS open-sourcing the VFP codebase (including the core), I don't think I've seen one suggestion regarding the possibility of MS sublicensing or selling the intellectual property that is VFP to a smaller company that was interested in it.

Do you think they would sell it? I've often wondered if MS didn't regard VFP as more of a threat to its profit margins than an asset to its product line. When MS brought FP and then VFP forward years ago with a royalty-free model, I thought that was just grand. It's the independent developer who really stands to gain, as well as the IT shop within a company that rolls its own apps. If you can simply get a potential client (or manager) to let you go to bat with VFP, you can usually just run circles around the other development platforms and with fewer people at that.

What I'm a bit worried about is that it would not be too hard in future OS releases or upgrades for MS to simply break VFP in one way or another... kind of a coercion-through-evolution to force customers to buy new, more expensive apps or development platforms. For example, a MS-generated Y-VFP scenario (like Y2K) where MS gives warning months ahead of time that VFP apps simply won't run on whatever is their latest, greatest upcoming OS. So now your choices are to upgrade your devel platform to .NET 2010 and SQL server when OS upgrading time comes around, which also forces your clients to either pay big bucks to get their own SQL Server license, or simply do without the OS upgrade.

So I suppose what I perceive isn't so much a sadness regarding the end of VFP, rather it's more of an angst about MSFT changing its direction in a way that disempowers independent developers, small IT shops, developers in 3rd world countries, etc.