Hi Stewart,

I believe that MS is free to make its eulas as open or as restrictive as they please.

The reality seems to be that vfp does work on the linux platform, but that doesn't mean they have to allow it in their eula.

I see it like SUV's. They are able to go off-road, but ford could decide that driving an explorer off-road will void your warranty. Can they tell you where you can and where you can't drive? I don't know, but there are laws about this... you can't just drive off a highway wherever you want.

Well, can you? As long as you don't get caught, I don't see why not.

If a law is brokenn and there are no lawyers/cops to see you do it, are you still breaking the law? I'd say you are, but there would be no concequences to it (except what your conscience tells you).

Am I advocating that we do illegal things? No, just giving an opinion, and those are like belly-buttons - we all have one.

Do I agree with it? Let's say that I don't disagree with the eula, but to have a vendor tell me how to use their product, especially when no harm is done, rubs me the wrong way.

And I just remembered that household cleaners and other products have a warning that says that "using this product in a manner not consistent with its intended purpose is a federal offense". What's the purpose of this sentence? To be able to jail a glue-sniffer on drug use charges.

Now, let's look at it from MS' point of view: Les Pinter has a very good point in one of his essays, where he states that MS doesn't market vfp because one sale of vfp is just that: one sale, whereas one sale of vb is a sale that has the potential to generate further sales of sql-server, generating a stream of income.

Now that it's been demonstrated that MS products are able to run on other platforms, there's yet another threat to more MS products (this time servers and operating systems, which are their bread and butter).

MS could have just added code to their product to randomly check different parts of the OS and computer's hard disk to verify that it's indeed running on a MS platform and crash if it isn't. If they did that, people would slowly realize that MS products don't run reliably on linux. But then one talented hacker could find this code and take microsoft to court. The outcome of this is irrelevant, however MS would face another battle, loosing further credibility and money in legal fees.

Instead, they chose to pre-empt the legal intricacies and state openly in their licenses that MS products are for MS platforms.

The other option is the ibm approach, where you have these AS400 computers which have software that only run on them, and IBM gets away with charging $600 for a sh*tty $30 cd-rom drive and developers get to charge $200/hour for writing rpg apps that take 10 times longer than using a rad platform.

I personally prefer the microsoft alternative.

Have fun!

Alex