>With that "train of thought" in mind why does Microsoft provide any ODBC drivers or OLE DB providers for free? In this situation I as a developer have purchased a MSDN subscription and need to access VFP data from ASP. I am a little puzzled by this posturing. I know most knowledgeable clients who purchase applications consider data connectivity during the discovery process. Now I must respond to clients that if they want to access VFP data from Excel they have to either have me install a provider, use a legacy ODBC driver or purchase VFP.
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>I’m a little curious what the developer community thinks about this.

There are support costs associated with this, and the Fox team at Microsoft put a great deal of effort, money, resources, time into creating the OLE DB provider for VFP, so we giving it away for free only results in added supports costs for Microsoft with nothing in return. I hope this clarifies the reasoning on this.