>>Would you really trust another company to duplicate that in a copy cat environment?
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>Hi Rick. To be fair, FoxPro was orginally a copycat of Dbase, then far exceeded it. Yeah I know it took a few years.
Those were different times though when the level of complexity was very different than it is today.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't trust a small company - there are plenty of examples for small companies doing great work even on a large scale - but you do have to be careful. It's very easy to paint yourself into a corner going down that path with a strategic product you're going to build applications around. Especially when you're looking at a 'top level' development tool/language.