Microsoft is going open-source the core portions of the Visual FoxPro DBMS!

Fernando D. Bozzo

I want to be between the first ones to bring this news:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2105307,00.asp

!Can't believe that!

Best regards,

Fernando D. Bozzo

Alex Feldstein

Fernando,

The writer got carried away and misunderstood Alan Griver's announcement. The VFP Core stays put at v9 and will not be released to the public as open source. What will be released at Codeplex is Sedna, as I and others blogged and Microsoft announced.

dni

Yes, the last Vfp core will be in the next versions of vb and c++....but never free or open.

Craig Berntson

If you consider the VFP core going into .Net, then it will be free in the Express versions.

Claude Fox

I'm hoping the author has an inside track to what's really going on. Let's let this article take on a life of it's own, regardless - it really does make a good story. Really what does MS have to loose I think they will gain more as far as peer respect and recognition if they really did open the actual core. Also, it would be a great experiment for them.

If the core were opened some key things could happen: possibly a VFP.NET version/compiler, 64-bit VFP, support for future OSs, probably would run on Linux (is that a deal breaker - dosen't MS support .NET on Linux ). Minus the paranoia, I think this would really be a win-win for everybody...

dni

Yes, you are right.

dni

As you said, it will be included in vb and c++.

Fernando D. Bozzo

Ok, I know about Sedna and what YAG have said, may be is that I want to believe that MS will release the VFP core code without that with IP (like Rushmore).

This have some sense to me, but I've asked the autor of the article to clarify the point.

Thanks to all.

Budoi

One of VFP's strength IMO is its strong native cursor and data binding capabilities. Since .NET does not have what we know as the VFP cursor, porting it to .NET may lose one of its main advantages.

Claude Fox

The key thing is more choices. As an Open Source product, no one is going to force feed you a way of doing things...

TheLoon

Okay, so core portions will be given to other closed projects. Fair enough. I wonder what people can do with those other parts Would it be possible to build an open Foxpro IDE with MySQL for the database engine If they released the free parts as shared source (or whatever their half-way license is) would it still be a possibility

Craig Berntson

Have you seen http://dabodev.com/

Fernando D. Bozzo

About my post, I want to say that the autor have not answered my question to clarification about this, so I think that he talked about Sedna without mentioning it explicitly.

But even with this, the open-sourcing of Sedna is great news!

Regards,

Fernando D. Bozzo