Whil Hentzen, Microsoft Support Most Valuable Professional and the first winner of the FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award, traveled to the West Coast to present “Expanding your VFP Skillset with Linux” to the Bay Area Association of Database Developers, which included a demonstration of Visual FoxPro running under Wine on Linux. He was prevented from making the presentation. Here’s what happened:
—–Original Message—–
From: Chet Gardiner
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 2:47 AM
To: profox@leafe.com; prolinux@leafe.com
Subject: VFP under Linux – Not
FYI:
I attended the BAADD (Bay Area Association of Database Developers) VFP sig meeting this evening. It was to be something very special since Whil Hentzen was coming in to talk to us about developing with the Fox under Linux.
Whil made some very good points about the growth of Linux and the fact that it soon will be a very viable solution for the desktop for people who don’t (or can’t afford) microsoft’s extortionate policies, practices and prices. I’d have to agree. I had very little problem installing a workable version on one of the machines on my network. For instance, Red Hat 8.0 comes
with a complete office suite, email clients and servers, web server, samba network file service, etc, etc. You can download the images for free and try it out.
The most interesting point Whil made was that there was a group of people who really knows database applications (us) who could fit right into the Linux world if we got VFP running under it. They don’t need the apps now but soon and there’s no other viable 4GL language for Linux and Windows on the near horizon.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Whil got a call this afternoon from a semi-highly placed person from M$ who warned him that he would be in violation of the EULA for VFP if he demonstrated (or ran) VFP on a Linux OS. that he might run into some trouble from their huge stable of lawyers. There has been some discussion of letting M$ know how we feel about this attack on our potential livelihood. I intend to do just that.
I’ve seen this before, back in the late 70s/early 80s when IBM had 85% of the computing market share.
Chet