>If your position is based on a bad premise, the position becomes indefensible.

The scenario that VFP woudl take away from SQL was in response to the argument that charging for providor was bad marketing. I think that putting out VFP data thats freely accessible would be working against SQL marketing.

The position wasn't supposed to be "They should charge for the providor because ... " it was "Charging for the providor isn't bad marketing because ..."

>If people really wanted to use the VFP engine, they would.

I agree. I also think that if they wanted to use it, they would pay for it. And they should.

>Citing $20K per CPU licsence does not work. For a multi-million/billion dollar enterprise, $20K is less than a rounding error on the income statement or balance sheet...

Very true. However, not every application that needs a database is developed by a multi-million dollar enterprise. In the next five years, I think that Microsoft's and Sun's feel that large amounts of data that should be widley accessible is going to be a neccessity for everyone, not just the big guys.

>If your logic really held water, then when it comes to submitting a proposal, the lowest bid would always win.

Why do you say that? Maybe "If the lowest bid always won your argument woudl hold water" but not the other way around.

The reason I brought up $20k point was that the times that are ahead of us will be pretty different than what we've seen. With open source (and I think that databases are the next major target for the open source communities), major campaigns to "get legal" running software, the Web Services movement, and a strange economy alot of people will be thinking different.

>Any way you slice it, it was a badly executed decision...

I think the decision you don't like is developing the OLE-DB providor as a feature of VFP7. Because of that, the feature isn't freely distributable, theres not even a decision to make. To me its not even a marketing issue as some have made it.