FYI:

I attended the BAADD (Bay Area Association of Database Developers) VFP sig
meeting Wed. evening. It was to be something very special since Whil
Hentzen was coming in to talk to us about developing with the Fox under
Linux.

Whil made some very good points about the growth of Linux and the fact that
it soon will be a very viable solution for the desktop for people who don't
(or can't afford) microsoft's extortionate policies, practices and prices.
I'd have to agree. I had very few and very minor problems installing a version
on one of the machines on my network. The Red Hat 8.0 install comes with
a complete office suite, email clients and servers, web server, samba
network file service, etc, etc. You can download the images for free and
try it out.

The most interesting point Whil made was that there was a group of people
who really knows database applications (us) who could fit right into the
Linux world if we got VFP running under it. They don't need the apps now
but soon and there's no other viable 4GL language for Linux and Windows on
the near horizon.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Whil got a call this
afternoon from a semi-highly placed person from M$ who warned him that he
would be in violation of the EULA for VFP if he demonstrated (or ran) VFP on
a Linux OS. that he might run into some trouble from their huge stable of
lawyers. There has been some discussion of letting M$ know how we feel
about this attack on our potential livelihood. I intend to do just that.

M$ won't market it for Windows applications, even those for which it's the
best tool. Now M$ won't let us run it on any other OS, especially the one
that's going to kick their butts. They are so interested in owning everyone's
desktop that don't they see that in this way they could sell a whole lot of
VFP stuff to other programmers and make some money out of it. But then,
they think they'll make a lot more money the way they're doing it now.

Chet Gardiner
www.chetgardiner.com