In fact, I agree with you about what their intentions probably were, but I still find the use of the words 'work around' a trifle odd. I have never heard anyone use those words in connection with the idea of hacking the language code itself. Since the MS EULA is aimed at developers, it kind of sticks in my craw that they've apparently co-opted words we all commonly use to mean 'finding an alternative (read cumbersome) way of doing something that should have been simple' and bent them to mean something none of us can really understand.

As far as the 2 gig limitation, I think it just points up that the lawyers seem to be working in a vacuum when they come up with this junk. If they talked to the developers before publishing such nonsense, maybe we'd get wordings that make sense to us.

>I read the technical limitations to mean, but not necessarily limited to, the system limits found in the help file. Let's take the 2GB limit on tables. When the design of the table was drawn up, there was a physical limit on HD size that was less than GBs. I suspect the team came up with the actual limit because it is 2 to some power to get to the 2 GB limit or somesuch. The point is that 2GB limit at the time it was set was not arbitrary. If the VFP team were to increase or remove that limit, it would almost mean an entire rewrite of the VFP data engine or at least an enormous amount of additional work and not just the changing of the table structure itself. That is not something that the team has as a priority.
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>To relate this to the EULA, licensees are not allowed to tinker with the internal workings of VFP to circumvent the 2GB limit of a table. It does NOT say that you can not design a way to split tables up or come up with other imaginative ways to handle similar data that is more than 2GB in size. If that were so, I think the EuroTunnel app would be in grave danger.
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>>Sorry, I can't kill this now, but this was meant for Mark, not Victor.
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>>Are you suggesting then that work around technical limitations in the software and reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software mean exactly the same thing? If that's the case, why say it twice (with one of those times being extremely obtuse). If not, then how do you reconcile work around technical limitations in the software with hacking the exe or dll? This EULA is written for developers, and I'd say that pretty much all developers use the words 'work around' to mean the same thing, and it doesn't mean 'hacking the software'. Why would MS use that wording in such an unusual way?
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>>Now, I agree that this probably doesn't really mean that I'm prohibited from working around the 2 gig table limitation by using SQL server as a back end, but still, the wording seems to say I am (provided that's really one of the reasons I'm doing it).
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>>It's too bad lawyers can't ever seem to say what they actually intend.