-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday 29 April 2003 10:29 am, Fred A. Miller wrote:

"The cold, dead hand of the Microsoft monopoly also reached out to touch the project when Whil Hentzen, a leading proponent of Visual FoxPro (VFP) development on Linux, was contacted by a Microsoft manager and told it was a violation of the VFP EULA to run it on Linux."

http://www.linuxworld.com/go.cgi?id=742282

Yep, another sign that M$ is sweating the OSS community even more. If indeed "Visual FoxPro has a free runtime", then M$ is getting a little pushy (as usual). I don't see why someone doesn't bring this up with the committee that oversees the M$ monopoly constraints and behaviors. I mean if the runtime is free then what is M$'s contentions related to violations of the EULA? Is this about components that don't fall under the free/open runtime or what? If it is about such things as the gui, plugins, or other aspects - then M$ only has half a leg to stand on IMHO. If indeed by using some components that violate the EULA then this could be a bit of a setback, but not kill it. One would have to go and redevelop those aspects of the program that is not free/open. But, that is by no means impossible, just a tad time consuming (or perhaps I'm wrong - the article didn't go into specifics). Hmmm, this will be something to keep tabs on. I have always been wondering, in the back of my mind, when/if M$ would start to raise a stink about the whole "wine" thing. I can run many more Win apps under a generic Wine install then 6 months ago. I understand the CrossOver things work quite well and are improving. And as for WineX, well I just DL'ed the lastest version (v3.0) and also the new Point2Play programs (v1.0), The installshield and DirectX coding is vastly improved and I can see it coming to a point very soon that I will be able to kiss M$ off completely because if the vendors don't port to Linux it won't really matter. And It's also nice to see the changes in the way the gui world in Linux is going. For instance, the P2P (point2play) makes it very easy to install app/games and does so in a manner that keeps each app/game segregated from the other so the fake window and registry are not overlapping and hence don't conflict. Also, by using a gui that p2p offers, it makes it very simple to get things up and running - and they running better all the time. I see this advent more and more. I have another program (YaNC - yet another nvidia configurator) that does essentially the same thing the NVidia program for windows does. I can have access to more functionality and parameters than I do in windows and it does it in a gui and I point and click (nothing wrong with using "export <command> [integer}"). End-users, converts and gamers et al, will be able to get functionality at the get go. Lastly. I find the fact the when M$ so desires they have absolutely no problems porting their apps to other platforms. Take the MAC (especially =< v9.x) with IE and Office, not to mention others. They did this on non-x86 archs (ppc) and it works as any other. Also they have now ported Office to OS-X which is BSD base and hence a nix platform. So, I see this as trying to workaround to the increasing functionality and inevitable increase in market share Linux/OSS will gain in both enterprise and the generic consumer market. They're still fighting a losing battle IMHO because the OSS community and development has no corporate head to attack - much as M$ would like to they really can't conqueor the world of developers and hence the market overall. It's just more smoke and mirrors AFAIC. Just my $0.02. Cheers, Curtis. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+sAn47WVLiDrqeksRAgZKAJ944I9R+L7NdCNYwtgK6m2Pk/5fFACgg0+L dzdP0cXw+Ny3QOPQPPra8tI= =eD4F -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----