On Nov 27, 2007, at 7:57 PM, Bill Arnold wrote:
> MS's acquisition of VFP was like a marriage with kids involved. Sure,
> the marriage can break up and dissolve, but the kids have to be taken
> care of by the parents, like it or not.
I don't know what you're smoking, but you got your money's worth! ;-)
> The way I see it is simple: MS purchased FoxPro, promoted it (even
> less
> then whole-heartedly), convinced people to invest in it, they did, and
> then, years later after people have huge investments in the
> product, MS
> tells them to f**k off.
More people "invested" in FrontPage than ever did in VFP. Those
folks were cut loose, without even a 7-year support plan. What did
they do? They moved to ASP and ASP.Net, just as Microsoft assumed
they would.
Microsoft is making a business decision, and has decided to stop
development of what is inarguably a very old product. They've given
you *7* years to find alternatives. I'm no Microsoft fanboy, but
that's hardly telling VFP developers to fuck off.
Bill, the writing has been on the wall for years. It was written in
a huge font, with lots of lighting to make it crystal clear to anyone
who cared to look. Many of us took that warning to heart, and learned
alternate skills to carry us into the future. You chose not to do
that, but to focus exclusively on VFP. Now it seems that you are
regretting your choice, but instead of taking responsibility for your
decisions, you're attempting to blame Microsoft.
Paul and I wrote Dabo for people like you. It isn't a clone of VFP
by any stretch of the imagination, but it has the same sensibility
and approach to development that made VFP such a great tool. Take a
look at the screencast by John Fabiani and Larry Long, two long-time
VFP developers who have moved to Dabo:
http://leafe.com/screencasts/realworlddabo.html
It shows exactly the sort of rich client app that you have come to
expect from VFP, but it is written in a product that is 100% open and
free, and will run on Windows, Mac or Linux.
Change is inevitable. VFP was/is an amazing tool, but it will never
return to its former glory. You really do have to consider what
direction you want to take from here on in. You can cling to VFP
until it is no longer viable; that should take you at least a decade
into the future, but with an increasingly frustrating position. You
can move to what Microsoft is offering today, knowing that that
should be good for another 2-4 years before they change it again. Or
you can use this opportunity to move to something that is not
shackled to the designs of the Microsoft Marketing Department; to
something that no one can ever "bury" as Microsoft has with VFP.
-- Ed Leafe
-- http://leafe.com
-- http://dabodev.com
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