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So when FoxPro cost $695 and had advertising and probably a much larger team of developers the product was not subsidized or in your words "the notion of subsidies in pre-VFP days is in fact irrelevant" - but at $800 today and with no advertising and a smaller team, you think there is a subsidy from Windows?
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Fox does not cost $800 today. You need to check your facts.


>Also from a version 2.0 Press Release at The History of FoxPro:
>The Distribution Kit can create three forms of packaging for distributed applications: the traditional runtime, small EXE executables using a central library, or single monolithic EXE's. All three are completely royalty free; once developers buy the Distribution Kit they never need pay Fox any royalties or account for their sales in any way.
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>Was the press release lying or were they simply erroneous in their use of the term Royalty Free?
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Of course you could distribute royalty free - but you had to pay extra for the toolkit. There was no OS revenue to pick up the slack.


>I could cite plenty of other references to the Distribution Kit being considered Royalty Free for example here is Tamar Granor's take on your theory:
>Re: An argument in defense of MS and the .NET/VFP EULA's Thread #780795 Message #781049

Tamar's post is an opinion - and one that is not backed up with any reasoning. The essential point is that out of the base box -you had could not distribute applications royalty free - since re-distributable run-times were not available (unless you purchased the distribution kit). After acquiring the distribution kit - could you distribute royalty free? Yes - but you had to kick in another $300. At best - Tamar picked up on a semantic point.

As far as the comparative prices are concerned (and again - you are incorrect that Fox costs $800 today), lets remember that this was nearly 10 years ago. Further, we are talking about a apples and oranges when comparing Fox Software to MS. As companies, they are in completely different universes.

A subsidy is nothing more than some sort of financial assistance. Windows - as a platform - subsidizes our efforts to distribute royalty free - VB, VFP, .NET apps, etc. Either directly or indirectly - this is the case.
This is all royalty free so long as the apps are distributed on the windows platform. This aspect of the EULA is targed specifcally to the re-distributable components. You may look at and conclude that this as something nefarious. Nonetheless - nothing you cite above negates the point that Windows subsidizes royalty-free distrbution.

Now - if you want to cite some authority - why not find something in the economics realm to dispute my assertion?

< JVP >