>>Would you really trust another company to duplicate that in a copy cat environment?
>
>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.