Rick,

MIcrosoft no longer cares about software IP, and software ownership at large.
This used to be a strategic issue for 20 years, today they won’t spend a dime on that.
Please try to wake up!


>>>>There we go. Looks like we argue around a definition here.
>>>>Savant? To me a person with a very limited width of knowledge, but this to high skills.
>>>
>>>When I used the term "savant" I was referring to someone with exceptional abilities, such as the ability to have photographic recall of things he's seen from prior disassembly. It's an uncommon ability, and I used the term "savant" to relate to that uncommon ability.
>>>
>>>https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/savant
>>>
>>>"A savant is a person of great learning or natural ability."
>>
>>You describe only the one half of the symptoms. Savant syndrome is a condition in which someone with significant mental disabilities demonstrates certain abilities far in excess of average. Simply think the persons abilities distribution follows the Dirac delta function. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function for the math. So called normal persons have there abilities streched over a wider field to average skills. That's the definition of normal. On that, I do not consider myself as normal. I know where my strenght is - and where my disabilities are.
>
>That's one definition of savant (mental disabilities). The definition I was using referred only to exceptional abilities without other issues.
>
>I'll rephrase:
>
>"In addition, unless Chen is a man with exceptional and uncommon mental abilities, able to keep things in his head the rest of us would require documentation to maintain, he would be unable to do any large scale examination of the software without taking notes, noting design, doing some kind of documentation in his efforts."
>
> Let's ask him:
>
>Chuanbing Chen, did you decompile VFP binaries, taking notes, documenting your work, reverse engineering its design, figuring out through complex reason and analysis how it works so you could apply patches?
>
>BTW, if I was Microsoft, I would buy Chen's work and implement what he's done along with a few other fixes as an official service pack release, thereby legally solidifying my position that VFP is a going concern. It would give them a stronger legal position in moving forward, and it would be low cost (a few hundred thousand paid to Chen).