>>Not only has the train left the station, but they also demolished the station. A vote for me as the new president of USA has a bigger chance to succeed than this gullible attempt.
A business transaction involves exchange of value. The petition asks for something that provides MS no apparent value and their best option is to continue to ignore, just as they did with the last petition. I agree that those are the business realities. However, the petition already has hundreds of signatures and I still signed it, spending less time to do so than you've spent on this and another forum expressing doubts. ;-) Perhaps if more people like you and I signed, MS might shrug and toss us a bone as another demonstration that they do listen to customers rather than only ever marching loyalists towards disasters like WP7. They have open-sourced some of their avowedly mission-critical stuff and the more signatures, the easier a decision it becomes.
FWIW I doubt there is any residual tech in VFP worth specific protection. Rushmore is a >20-year-old technology and there are open source dbf indexing options allowing >2gb and just as good if not better than Rushmore. What does have value is millions of lines of MS customers' Fox code accumulated over almost 3 decades and worth millions of dollars even today. Whoever comes up with a way to perpetuate this value can expect a gold star. ;-) The other consideration is that one man without access to the sourcecode and working part time has managed to fix VFP bugs and even recompile for 64bit. Seems to me MS would be smart to align itself with such effort rather than forever being the culprit people had to work around.
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1