Well, if a former Fox Team PM can do it, a former Fox Team Test can. I have signed the petition.

Although, frankly, I would be amazed if anything came of it. Pablo, we eat and breathe FoxPro and we know how useful it is. .Net is cumbersome to say the least in the sorts of installations where Fox excels. But the big guys there don't see it that way...most of them don't even know what Fox is or thought it died a long time ago.

Moving VFP to Open Source won't happen and, even if it did, what then? Who's gonna maintain the code? There aren't a lot of C++ gurus in the Fox world AFAIK. It's an extraordinarily complex codebase with a mix of C and C++.

The only thing I can see that might work is if some group with deep pockets offered MS big bucks for the code and signed contracts to black box some intellectual property.

MS likes to think that they think globally but I don't think they do insofar as the dev world. I remember back in the planning stages for VFP 8 I suggested to Ken and others that we have a $99 stripped down version of VFP for foreign markets. With the cost to launch a new SKU and the size of the team, it wasn't practical and I don't think others agreed with me as well.

That's where I think some stupidity lies - the inability to appreciate the foreign market. I've been told that some 3rd world developers may only make a few hundred dollars on a delivered application. This is with Fox where the cost to the customer is nothing above the basic hardware and software requirements. Now...with .Net the development time is greater because of the lack of true visual inheritance and the lousy data story and the hosting bar is higher in terms of modern hardware and Win versions. How do you sell that?

Funny, though, someone at MS Access has their smart hat on because if you look at the marketing documents for Access 2007 you see that they're trying to jump into this breach.

Then again, one could argue that VFP 9 is so feature complete that there is no need for a VFP 10 for the foreseeable future as long as VFP is updated to work and play well with later versions of Windows and SQL. There is nothing preventing VFP developers delivering VFP 9 solutions to customers this year or 5 years from now. I'm struck by the number of VFP 6 solutions still prevalent as mainline enterprise solutions...that's 1997 technology.

VFP offers a simple, flexible, and low-footprint means to deliver powerful desktop and networked business solutions. Nothing else in the MS product line, except (maybe) Access, can make that claim. There's a hole there but they just don't see it.

MS didn't keep VFP around because of the product or the tech gap I described - they did it because of sales to the faithful. A shame.


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