>The only thing accomplished by not distributing the OLE-DB Provider with MDAC was to tick off the very community that is allegedly supported. As for encouraging upgrades, whether the OLE-DB provider was/was not included, I don't think the upgrade/purchase numbers would be materially affected.
>

I remember hearing somewhere (DevCon Webcast?) that being part of a system component such as MDAC was "very expensive", whatever that means. I think even the VFP ODBC driver was dropped from the package with MDAC 2.6, but of course is still freely available.