>>If IP law and settlement revolved only around damage, patent trolls selling no product could not exist...

Patent Trolls and Corporates both go to court to maximize their revenues, not over matters of principle with no $ attached.

For years, vendors of products like Refox, Cryptor, Konxise, PHDBase and many others have delved in VFP's innards or messed with runtimes to deliver additional value, without denying MS a cent of revenue. MS is smart: there's no gain in attacking people who provide value without costing you a bean, especially if the value includes fixed bugs that were allowed to languish for years or involves a product that you don't want to support yourself.

Contrast with the attempts to get VFP working on Wine in Linux. MS came down hard and fast that time, because running on Linux potentially denied Windows revenues.

I'd also observe that apart from the free bug fixes, Chen does charge for a system to protect VFP apps better than the easily hooked native protection. Perhaps you saw on Foxite there were some experiments at cracking protected VFP apps? In those experiments, other protection systems were cracked in minutes but there were only 2 people who were able to pry apart Defox or VFP Compiler. It was far from easy and both protection systems have since improved. I can't imagine MS asserting IP rights over a deprecated product because its native protection is useless and somebody else is assisting MS customers to protect their IP better.