>>My advice is to ... help me finish mine. I have it about 40% completed, and about 80% designed. It functions from the command line, but has many incomplete features:

My advice is that customers need to be able to do queries against VARCHAR(max) today, so unless you have an alternative now, please don't think it noble to sabotage other efforts you say you have no intention of using.

As you well know: win or lose, US legal costs usually fall on the respective parties which is why it's so antisocial to provoke legal reactions against others from corporates with deep legal pockets.

If you're really worried about poor old MS's rights, just recall their benevolent acceptance of Refox that uses reverse-engineered knowledge of VFP IL and VFP runtime commands like strtofile. The only time I recall when MS did publicly reference the EULA was when VFP was getting traction on Linux Wine, but the EULA permits use of distributed runtimes only on Windows. There's an obvious argument that using Wine might diminish MS's Windows revenue, but rather than finding out the VFP proposer backed down to avoid legal confrontation. I hope nobody is so vicious as to attempt the same against you if and when you deliver an alternative to VFP. Unless you've got a spare $100K, legal ructions in the US are to be avoided.