Ed Leafe wrote an article for Linux Journal magazine’s website, and it was published today. He tells me that he has sent in an addendum that covers the Microsoft “clarification” and the John T. Mitchell article; this should be added sometime later today. Here’s the link:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6869
I posted an entry to the FoxForum Wiki a while ago on News Aggregators and RSS. Fellow FoxPro MVP Alex Feldstein picks up on it and updated it here . Posted from the FoxForum Wiki, RSS available at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/319360/2003-04-20/2003-04-26/0 is reporting on a painfully simple snippet of code that crashes Internet Explorer. It doesn’t appear to open the door to any exploits, but still… pretty pitiful. Trustworthy Computing, eh? Not there just yet.
Since it crashes IE, and IE is a component in applications like Outlook FrontPage and the Visual FoxPro Task Pane Manager, the code will crash those applications as well.
“Microsoft Risks Copyright Impotence” is the title of an article by John T. Mitchell, a practicing attorney in Washington, D.C. on the FoxPro EULA issue.
Ed Foster wrote many seminal columns in his Gripe Line column at InfoWorld over the past 11 years. Now, he’s off on his own, creating a new website/blog/web publication at http://www.gripe2ed.com. One of his first columns is on the Visual (not Virtual, Ed, at least not yet!) FoxPro End User License controversies.
While he focuses on the primary problem of Visual FoxPro runtimes being tied to the Windows platforms, the other issues of restricting distribution to Microsoft’s new Installer technologies, and the slipstreamed requirements for upgraders to remove previous versions of the application (both summarized and linked here) are not discussed.
The launch of VFP 8.0 prompted a story in Application Development Trends magazine, “Visual FoxPro 8.0: The venerable database tool gets a makeover.” I’m not sure if I agree with the “makeover” concept, as it wasn’t aging and crufty before, only continuing to improve. But I suppose that’s not as interesting a story. “Still kicking butt” might have been my preferred phrase. Ah, well, let’s not complain too much. Any PR is good PR, and the article is pretty well-done, factual and upbeat. From Application Development Trends magazine.
MS issues Visual FoxPro OS statement …. To VFP fan sites [The Register]
Scoble picks up on the Schafer blog… http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/04/27.html#a2889
It’s enlightening reading and listening to people who aren’t invested in one side of the argument or the other explain what they are hearing in the controversy over Visual FoxPro’s End User License restrictions on developing and deploying solutions on Linux and other non-Microsoft platforms. Dan Shafer shares his view in “Microsoft Trying to Kill Wine on Linux?.” Interesting point of view.
Mike Gunderloy picks up the thread from the Register here: http://www.larkware.com/Articles/TheDailyGrind53.html.
OSForge picks up the story, too, typos and all:
http://www.linuxmax.net/news/001048.html