>The question you have to ask yourself is why
>are we allowed to distribute - royalty free on Windows and compare that to why we are not allowed to distribute royalty-free on Linux. In one case, MS rang the register with Windows. In the other case, MS did not ring the register with Windows.

How about the fact that Fox, when it was bought, already had a mass following which was used to the product which had a royalty-free distribution? And that the promise from Microsoft to these masses at the time was "and you will still be able to distribute runtimes for free".

And how about the fact that lot of Fox technology is inserted pretty much everywhere in Windows (SQL server etc)(oops... that one is still not part of the OS).