Ken,

Quoting from your previous message:

>The Fox team put great time, effort, and resources into creating the VFP OLE DB provider, and we don't want to have people obtain it for free especially with other products such as Delphi free of charge then end up getting technical support from MS asking questions about it.

I think you are making a major mistake with this approach. When it was first announced that the VFP OLE-DB driver would not be included in the MDAC distributions, the reason given by a few MS Fox people was that they wanted to keep a separate ship schedule and not be tied to the MDAC distribution schedule (and perhaps other headaches related to that bundle).

I expressed a concern at that time that removing VFP support from MDAC adds to the overall impression that VFP is poorly supported by Microsoft. Let's say you have a VB programmer who wants to use the OLE-DB driver to get to VFP data -- first, it isn't in the standard MDAC like everything else, then he finds it is not downloadable. This reinforces the idea that VFP is not supported.

From a more recent message:

>Sure, online mainly. The support issue is only a small factor in the overall decision making on this, while getting people to upgrade to VFP 7.0 in order to use this VFP 7.0 technology/component is the major factor. You might say we are charging for it, but really it is free with VFP 7.0. Plus, VFP 7.0 is very inexpensive compared to other developer tools and database systems on the marketing.

Let's say I am dealing with an ISP who does not usually provide support for FoxPro tables. I say that I want them to install the VFP OLE-DB driver (this is on a shared server where they routinely provide Access drivers). OK, the ISP says, where can I get it? I say, sorry, but the only way you can get it is to run my custom installer that I have built -- or buy a copy of VFP7. I'm going to have an uphill battle in this situation.

Multiply this thousands of times by people who work in some other language or application (Excel, Word), who have no need or desire to buy a copy of VFP7 just to get access to the drivers.

I think this is bad decision, frankly, from a marketing standpoint. IMO, very few people who cannot get the OLE-DB driver for free will buy a copy of VFP7 to get it. All you will accomplish is making people mad and proving the theory that MS does not support VFP well.

One of the best ways to get good excitement going about VFP is to make the driver freely available.