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.