>I'd be interested to know just how many people really care about this at this time. I can't imagine huge numbers of Fox developers dying to start developing apps in/for Linux. Or am I behind the times ?
>
>Or is it just a principle thing ? Big bad MS trying to rule the world etc.

IMHO, I do support Whil in his quest to provide info on his discoveries and achievements on running VFP on Linux. I've been in a similar situation as well last year. Many would remember this story about such a small artwork we did where I also received a notice of removal as it was not ok with MS legal.

My view is the following and that may differs from anyone reading it. When such small entities are working hard to help the promotion of such a product from such a giant, if I'd be in the giant's shoes, I'd just be happy and leave it as is. I can easily understand why a small company would want to get in, and again, it could be debated. But, in those two circumstances, I really don't see the point of MS legal jumping in where the intentions expressed by both parties are focusing to help the promotion of Visual FoxPro.

Lets start over with some basic information. There are many more but those, from my understanding, are the based facts.

In my case, we did an artwork where we've been told that this was somewhat deforming an existing logo. However, this was an artwork on our own. Yes, as I already mentioned, and still today, I am sure we would have won our case if we would have proceeded on it. But, the expenses required to obtain that wouldn't have been justified for such a small case. Later on, and from what I found as well, many confirmed that similar situations happen elsewhere but the owner of the sites never received any call from MS. Some had the perception the big players were targeted as the target generated are much bigger on some places than others. On some other sites, direct violations have been demonstrated in regards to similar issues but again, nothing was claimed.

As for Whil, he demoed or was about to demo a presentation on running VFP on Linux or similar. That was targeted at user groups. AFAIK, and the contrary would surprise me, Whil doesn't get any income out of that. Whatever is presented at user groups is usually done on a contribution basis. Additional information about the product and some cool ones, I guess, was or would have been showed. So, this is what the community is all about. Here, other sites, user groups, conference events and other similar entities are there for that. Then, I understood something was also related to the publication of one of his article in FoxTalk. Targeted to the same audience with similar material, something was again mentioned about it.

Based on my example, what would have happened if another not so well known speaker would have presented or wrote it? That's an interesting question.

Since I got that call last year, whatever character I type in a PRG, whatever I do in an application and whatever related tasks I'll do in the product is being treated with care, much more than before as I now ask myself the question of knowing if typing a command in VFP is against MS legal. Ok, take it with a little sense of humour but seriously, I'd say we deserve much more recognition than that. We (the community and whoever likes the product) have worked hard for years to help the community and to also help as best as we can the MS VFP team (for marketing proposals, suggestions, etc.) in order to assure the longest existence as possible of Visual FoxPro. So, the last thing we need is such story for such little issues.