>> 1. By making the Beta public by giving it away to all DevCon attendees, you aren't making it generally available. I guess my question would be, why not? <<

Giving the beta to DevCon attendees is just a CD and it will not include any beta support, which is not the same as a general public beta. The resources it would take to create a public beta are going towards supporting additional features in VFP 8.0 and making sure it is as stable as possible, which the FoxPro team feels is more important for VFP developers than having a public beta.

> Don't MSDN subscribers get beta versions that were released to anyone outside of the beta sites? <<

When public betas exist, they are included with MSDN subscriptions. But as I said, there will not be a general public beta of VFP 8.0 for reasons I described above.