Hi

>John,
> This is not entirely unprescedented. Dbase was purchased from borland some years ago. Check out www.dbase2000.com
>
>One difficulty will be prying fox from Microsoft. I am not so sure they would want fox out there in the wild. However, it never hurts to ask. They might just give it away.

My opinion is that the product is too good Microsoft to give it away (at least now). Also is too old to be promoted.
If Microsoft sell it, maybe the buyer will remove actual limitations, port it to Linux, develop a server component, agressively market it or god knows what (native code or CLR compiler maybe). This doesn't look good :)

The same happened with Interbase after was released as open source, from an almost died product it changed to a widespread product under both Windows and Linux. Then Borland choosed to close sources and to develop commercial versions. Happy Borland ! The open source project didn't died, but evolved as Firebird project, now with over a million installations worldwide.
Maybe Microsoft is afraid of something like this, I don't know.

I think that Microsoft will never sell it, maybe discontinue and let it die slowly . Who knows ? Will see.


>
>The real difficulty will be finding qualified people to manage the source as well. If it was managed under open source you would have an easier time of it.
>
>Rodman