Two of the bad boys who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto – Doc Searls and David Weinberger – are at it again. World of Ends is their next set of clues to the rest of us, especially the blockheads. Check it out.
Archive | March 7, 2003
March 26th: Boston Area FoxPro User Group
Boston FUG, March 26th: Application Development and Data over the internet. The Boston Area FoxPro User Group meets the fourth Wednesday of nearly every month at the Microsoft offices in Waltham, MA, 6 PM – 9 PM. Open to the public. For directions and more information, visit the group homepage. Subscribe or read the meeting announcements by clicking here. Wednesday, March 26, 6-7 PM: “Application Development Strategies: Final acceptance criteria, sign off, future enhancements. ” 7 – 9 PM: Guy Pardoe discusses how a VFP application can use a data source located anywhere on the Internet with the use of West-Wind Web Connect. Demonstrations will include the use of VFP and SQL Server backends. [FoxCentral.Net]
FoxForum Wiki RSS Feed Alpha Test Ends
Due to connectiviity issues, I’ve stopped trying to sample the FoxForum wiki. I can’t tell if there’s some problem with my connection, or if the server is refusing my connections. Ah, well, on to other things…
Update: Owner Steven Black posted a message that the site is down due to a failed router or server at his office. He’s off on a skiing vacation this week and next, so we’re wiki-less for the duration. Bummer.
VFP 8.0 EULA: Craig Folds
In his latest blog, Craig decides that Microsoft is right in enforcing their upgrade rights. I still think it is nonsense. The only people entitled to the upgrade are those who probably don’t need it, since they aren’t supporting previous deployments of FoxPro.
I think the upgrade discount ought to be a reward for loyalty to previous owners. I think the change in EULA is Microsoft’s way of extracting more revenue from their customer base. They’ve done really well at this, keeping up their revenues in a period where nearly all high-tech businesses have reported a downturn. But they are doing it at a cost to their customer base.
Finally, the real problem I have with the EULA is that Microsoft slip-streamed it in, and didn’t alert their customers that there was a license change they needed to be aware of. That was a violation of trust.
I had resolved to purchase a copy this time around, despite the seven MSDN subscriptions, past and present, and the many existing copies of VFP I own, as a means of communicating to Microsoft, in the language that they best understand ($$$) that VFP was an important product I wanted to see continued. I chose to purchase a full version, to avoid any question about my rights to use every version of VFP I need to support my customers. But I am not happy about the damage they are doing, once again, to their loyal VFP customer base.
Information Wants To Be Free. For a Price.
“Ah yes, Free. Nobody who’s been awake online for more than five minutes can have missed Stewart Brand’s famous aphorism, “information wants to be free”. What he said next is just as important, for all it gets forgotten: “Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new (technological) devices makes the tension worse, not better”
— Rupert Goodwin’s commentary on ZDNet.uk. Read more here