Craig,

>Licenses for 4500 machines...let's see....$200 a pop, that still doesn't cover one person on the Fox team, let alone his benefits, office, desk, computers, etc. Not to mention the costs that have to be attributed to the Windows team for those licenses.

I am not trying to build a "milk maid calculation" (does that german expresission exist english as well ?) to prove that it would be in MS's interest to start work again in vfp. I also heavily suspect that the testing cost makes a sizable dent into the vfp budget, as typically the testing cost grows as you have to test against each of your own applications applications as well as simple functional tests for changes in quite a few OS'. Although test automation can help help a lot, the sheer size of possible side effects is bad. Testing each version in the insurance company would cost more on testing than on development, as they had this whole bundle of other tasks installed each time with their "golden disk". Companies like Etecnologia would mostly have to test functional changes and interoperability with different OS versions and basic .Net/COM interoperability - and make it easier to themselves by documenting support only for specific OS functionality.

>Additionally, there are hidden costs of Linux/open source that people don't see. I typically hear, "it's free", but when they start really crunching the numbers for IT support, service contracts, retraining of employees, etc, it often works out to be close to the cost of Windows.

Again no hard dispute - only that MS probably introduces some new features/menu hide-and-seek which is mostly unneccessary for the "business process" (inflating these costs for version changes slightly but definately) and that *part* of the retraining cost for linux is once/seldom only compared to the recurring cost of new versions. If viewed from quarterly ROI windows looks much better than on any guesstimate for versions spanning machine generations. And the believing in a budget calculation based on real facts, measurd productivity gains and cost is probably in the same league as beleiving in the easter bunny.

And as there were 8 vfp licenses inside the company "accounting" for all the above as well as a number of subcontractors like me calculating the impact of the single vfp sale is even more difficult<g>.

One thing very hard to measure: how different is such an effect in each country ? I do believe that the base acceptance of linux in europe (some contacts in austria, switzerland, france, spain and little knwoledge of the former eastern block) is higher than in the US. Even considering the revenue from windows installations to be markedly lower in poorer countries [is that politically correct <bg>] a missing windows specific do-it-all tool might be miscalculated when viewed from an US point of view. And here I am thinking more along the lines of php, ruby and python than about vfp, even if I truly like vfp in/for that role.

regards

thomas