Microsoft to Open Source FoxPro

rah1420 writes "Microsoft has announced that it will open-source the core portions of the Visual FoxPro DBMS software to its CodePlex community development site. At the same time, Microsoft has announced that it will no longer be making new versions of the FoxPro DBMS."

Umm, no.

[dudeman2]

See first comment in the article by a Microsoftie:

NOTE that the released part is Sedna and NOT VFP nor VFP core elements!

Sedna is a project Microsoft has been working on for the past year or so. Sedna is built using the extensibility model of VFP9 and provides features like better connectivity to SQL Server, integration with parts of the .NET framework, wrappers for Vista APIs to make it easier to write applications that run on Vista machines, as well as better support for VFP data in Visual Studio.
 

Re:Umm, yes

[morgan_greywolf]

Where does it say that in TFA? This is what I see:

Instead of releasing new versions of FoxPro, Microsoft will release core portions of the FoxPro software to its CodePlex community development site, said Alan Griver, a group manager within the Microsoft Visual Studio team, which leads the FoxPro team.

and then, later:

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been working on "Sedna," which is the code name for the project that takes advantage of enhancements in Visual FoxPro 9.0. The primary goal of Sedna is to expand on the ability of Visual FoxPro-based solutions to better integrate with other Microsoft products and technologies, such as Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Windows Vista.

No, it really looks like Microsoft is open-sourcing VFP, or at least its core components.

Re:Umm, still no

[sweatyboatman]

The article is vague and misleading. Alan Griver (who heads Microsoft's VFP team has been talking alot on his blog about it). Here's the straight-dope [msdn.com]...

How about open sourcing the core product too?
We've been asked this for years. That's not going to happen. The main reason is that there is too much intellectual property in the VFP core codebase.

That seems pretty definitive to me.

For clarification: Sedna (the stuff that's going into CodePlex) is not now (nor was it ever intended to be) the next version of Visual Foxpro. It's just a set of VFP-based tools intended to help current VFP developers to make better use of new features in Vista/SQL Server/etc...

Meanwhile, VFP 9 is getting a final service pack and then that's it as far as Microsoft is concerned. There's certainly no plans to open-source the IDE or the VFP engine because, frankly, Microsoft would never do that. Some of the technology (and people) from VFP is going towards the LINQ project, but .NET is still a long way from offering the kind of streamlined data-oriented programming that Foxpro offers.

Re:

[Not The Real Me]

"...There's certainly no plans to open-source the IDE or the VFP engine..."

Microsoft released their free VFP OLEDB driver last year. It pretty much allows all the .NET, VB, Delphi, VC++, etc. developers to write apps that talk to legacy FP/VFP systems without being tied to the VFP IDE or having to have VFP installed. The VFP OLEDB driver seems to be a huge improvement over the older VFP ODBC driver and (for a Microsoft product) has a rather small footprint.

Re:

[killjoe]

There is an open source project inspired by VFP but based on python. It's called Dabo http://dabodev.com/ [dabodev.com] . Check it out if you are interested in getting on board with something that isn't obselete.

Re:

[Master of Transhuman]

And here's what the Dabo people have to say about Microsoft and VFP. Interesting comment that reflects some of the posts here.

"An incredible, powerful and grossly under-marketed tool for developing database apps that run in Microsoft Windows only. Its cursor engine is second to none in terms of power, speed and utility. VFP is a fully object-oriented language, with the ability to design classes both in visual tools as well as code-only. Despite neglect from Microsoft, which makes more money selling less cap

FoxPro to C or C++ translator?

[Futurepower(R)]

At one time there was software that could translate FoxPro (for DOS) code to C or C++. That would be a good way to transition from old FoxPro programs to something else.

Does anyone have a link or information?

(Note that, contrary to what the Slashdot story said, Microsoft is not really releasing any source code of value.)

Re:

[Master of Transhuman]

Quick Google found this. [vfpconversions.com]

They convert VFP to Delphi.

Can't find anything else, though.

I did find one reference about translating computer languages that said translating FoxPro to C++ speeds up the programs by 300% - no surprise there.

Have experience with FlagShip? (FoxPro is dead.)

[Futurepower(R)]

Do you have any experience with FlagShip [fship.com]? Apparently it can translate legacy xBase code to C++.

Since Microsoft is killing FoxPro [microsoft.com], everyone using it will need to transition to something else. What is the best way to make the transition?

Harbor Project xBase Compiler?

[Futurepower(R)]

Have experience with the Harbor Project [sourceforge.net] xBase compiler?

Older versions for Mac and Linux

[jshriverWVU]

I wonder if this will include the previous ports that ran under Mac and Linux.

Rushmore technology anyone?

[wandazulu]

Will the Rushmore technology that was so attractive to Microsoft in the first place be included in whatever they release? The way I understand it, Microsoft bought FoxPro from FoxBase to get Rushmore to add to Access 2, and then they wanted to dump FP. Apparently there was such a vocal outcry that they've kept FoxPro going, until now.

I'm curious because I really want to know what made FoxPro the speed demon it's always purported to be. I read somewhere that it was the first dbase-class database program that used bitmap indexes, but that was contradicted by another article from somewhere else.

Reason for speed

[Gonoff]

I was told that one reason that FP was so much faster than access was that the data was separate from the application - as opposed to Access lumping it in one ever growing file.

That wouldn't explain how it was faster than dBase though...

Re:

[70Bang]

heard ?

Mind you, I didn't read this in a tabloid. Some of the stories and|or facts may have are as far back as fifteen years ago. Some of it might have been made up in order to make things fit together a bit more.

IIRC, Access was released on Nov 15, '92: for $99. No one knows how many copies were shelfware, but it was selling as fast as shrinkwrap could be shrinked ;) I'm thinking the (total) number was in excess of 1M within two or three months. Oh, I almost forgot: Access wasn't their first go 'rou

Re:Rushmore technology anyone?

[Just Some Guy]

I'm curious because I really want to know what made FoxPro the speed demon it's always purported to be.

It's not. It may be quick for the common case of a small table (10K lines) on a local drive, but move outside that and it's horrid. FP supports multi-user access by putting the data files on a network drive. If you want to query it, your machine has to read to entire file, throw out the lines it doesn't want, and present the results. My company has about 40 people using the same legacy FP database from a RAID 1+0 system over gigabit ethernet, and it's still hundreds of times slower than running similar queries via SQL to any "real" database.

Let me put it this way: I wrote a program to export our FP tables to tab-delimited text files and then import those into PostgreSQL. This takes about 25 minutes, and we run it hourly - and it's still worth the pain. Reports altered to query PostgreSQL instead of FP typically see speedups of several hundred times, multiple users can run the same reports simultaneously, and you can actually run the reports over a slow link since only the query and resultsets have to traverse the network instead of the whole table.

I know this will come across as flamebait, and I'd normally not say this, but anyone who claims that FoxPro is fast is a hobbyist programmer. It's simply not fast by any imaginable standard other than the trivial case of small files on a single user's drive.

Re:Rushmore technology anyone?

[k12linux]

FoxPro IS fast or at least was when I used it last. BUT only if you are retrieving limited datasets that are indexed correctly. If your query can use indexed columns to limit the number of records returned you are ok.

I did the programming on a system which resided on a Netware v4.11 server back around 1993 and it had one table with somewhere around 3 million records. Queries were lightning fast if you didn't match too many rows and the query was optimized to work with your indexes. Queries which couldn't utilize indexes, however, were painfully slow.

Having said all that, however, I can't think of any legitimate reason to use DBASE style databases these days. With free DB servers like MySQL and PostgreSQL why bother?

Re:Rushmore technology anyone?

[Just Some Guy]

Queries were lightning fast if you didn't match too many rows and the query was optimized to work with your indexes.

But even indexed queries pale when compared to a "real" database. Since FP is file based - that is, each client has to read the files directly - even the index files have to be transmitted over the network to do those lightning fast queries. At some point you saturate your NIC, and after that all the processing power, RAM, or fast drives in the world won't make it a millisecond faster.

Compare and contrast with any client/server system, where all those queries are consolidated into one cache shared among all clients, and only the actual requested rows have to be returned. By its inherent architecture, FP simply cannot ever hope to be as fast.

Re:

[sutekh137]

Let's see... I just did a query against a 1.5 GB table (DBF) that has an index file (CDX) of 240 MB. I did an indexed query that returned 435 records or so, and it did it in 1.11 seconds.

So, you are mistaken. Either that, or my machine downloaded 240 MB in under a second. Sorry, our network isn't that fast. *smile*

I don't know much about file servers, but the entire index file does not need to come down. Not sure if that is a boon of the file server or of Foxpro, but I have been fighting that myth for

Re:

[Master of Transhuman]

I agree that FoxPro as a DATABASE is obsolete these days, compared to PostgreSQL or even MySQL.

I think the primary interest in FoxPro these days is its development environment, which was always leagues ahead of dBASE and others, and according to the Dabo people, way ahead of the rest of Microsoft's development environments - at least for application development. I have no idea if this is true since I haven't used any of them lately. I used FoxPro last back in the early nineties.

Re:

[Master of Transhuman]

"It is also easier to break big queries into multiple smaller queries in Xbase (FoxPro's original language). The equivalent in SQL is sometimes a big run-on sentence, a multi-breaded sandwich."

That is also one of SQR's (Hyperion's SQL/Report Writer combo language) useful abilities (about the only one aside from its report generation abilities). You can in essence "nest" queries in separate procedures. Depending on how good you are with SQL, you can gain some performance advantages by breaking up queries int

Re:

[nogginthenog]

If you want to query it, your machine has to read to entire file, throw out the lines it doesn't want, and present the results
That is incorrect. FoxPro only reads only the data it needs.

I know this will come across as flamebait, and I'd normally not say this, but anyone who claims that FoxPro is fast is a hobbyist programmer. It's simply not fast by any imaginable standard other than the trivial case of small files on a single user's drive.
Another lie. I've written FoxPro apps that are used in 100

Re:

[Linker3000]

Meh - You want to migrate your database to a twin floppy PC running PCFILE III! ...those were the days. ...ahh CGA PRoN

Sorry - been a long day!

Re:

[Just Some Guy]

My company has a large application written in VFP, used by quite a few people simultaneously, multiuser over gigabit ethernet, all DBFs on a central server, and performance is quite reasonable.

I'm (fortunately) not directly responsible for supporting it, but I knew the people who are and I trust that they've tried everything. Maybe it's just a different usage pattern that's.

I was brought in a few years ago to rewrite the quickly-written ASP website with something more extensible and maintainable. For

Re:

[Just Some Guy]

I'm partial to Python+wx+{MySQL|PostgreSQL}

We picked PostgreSQL for speed and for its generally better track record for protecting data. We haven't really picked a widget toolkit yet, although we now have some Python+wx apps in production. I'm personally hoping that QT4's Python bindings will be easy to develop with.

Re:

[Master of Transhuman]

Might want to look at the Dabo project [dabodev.com]- they're a bunch of Visual FoxPro people taking the VFP approach to application development, but supporting modern databases over multiple platforms.

AND they're using Python with the wxPython widget set!

I just got referred to them by a post up page, so I just checked out their site. Looks like an interesting project.

Re:

[Just Some Guy]

Yep, I already forwarded the link on to coworkers. :-)

Re:

[LWATCDR]

I don't think you have to leave Foxbase. Can't Foxbase be used as a front end for MSSQL or just about any SQL database that supports ODBC?

Moving to a client server database might allow you to have multiple sites linked with a VPN and still have good performance.

Re:

[LWATCDR]

Well if you are going to rewrite it then I suggest Java and the SQL back end of your choice running under Linux.
I feel Linux is a better server solution than Windows free or not. But if you are a happy Windows shop I will mention that both MySQL and PostgresSQL run under Windows with no problem.
I like Java over .NET because it will run on anything and you have a large and mature selections of libraries that you can use. You also have a selection of good free development tools. I like NetBeans and others lov

Re:

[LWATCDR]

Notice that I was willing to keep the Microsoft servers. I understand learning how to be a good sysadmin for Windows or Linux is hard work. If you have made the investment then moving from a working Windows server to a Linux server is lot of pain for little up front return. The same is true of development enforcements. Moving from VF to anything is going to be a large pain for little upfront gain.
If your application is working well now then moving the back-end from an XBase/Foxpro back-end to a SQL back-en

Re:

[LWATCDR]

Ekkk. Well you might have to move at some point since VF is at end of life. I understand vertical markets I develop for one myself. The thing is even in a vertical market you often have to change to keep up with what Microsoft is doing. I find it better to choose when to move then be forced into it.
I heard that VF is good until 2012 which is only five years. Best start the move now so it is done and tested in five years. Otherwise you may have to deploy a solution without proper testing.

Re:

[LWATCDR]

One quick not on Java + Postgres.
My second program in Java was one to replace our support Phone call tracking system. We do calls a little differently than most. Our outgoing calls are a flat fee but incoming on our 800 number is charged per minute. We return support calls and don't make customers wait on hold. I think it is a better system than the wait on hold and we try to call back in 20 minutes or less. My program tracks those calls in real-time. It used constantly and is very interactive. I have also

Re:

[Just Some Guy]

I have written huge DBMS applications both native 100% FoxPro (and Foxbase before that) and with SQL backends for 20 years. I get blazingly fast performance even with tables with over a billion records and over a TB in size.

The most impressive part of your claim is that you fit a billion rows and a TB of data into a table that only supports [microsoft.com] 1 billion rows and 2GB of data. Congratulations! I bow to your superior ability to exceed the boundaries of software design.

Unless, of course, you were referring t

Re:

[mplemmons]

Yup, Visual Foxpro was fast as hell, although IMO the speed topped out around version 3. And not just fast on rinky-dink tables, as long as they were reasonably indexed. Stick the server component of a c/s solution on the same server as where the data resides, and performance was great for tables having over 1M records. It was a good on the "back end" of web servers, for example.

More than speed though, I enjoyed the data-centric programming language. It was a joy to use and a bunch of functionality coul

Re:

[micromuncher]

Microsoft bought Fox to kill FoxPro as it was one of two solid database solutions for MacOS, and it was competition to Access. Within a year of the acquisition, all the Fox developers were on the bench or gone. I remember, 1997?, no one was actively on the project.

If only all orphaned software would go this route

[davidwr]

I wish all companies would open-source or at least make available free-as-in-beer their obsolete-and-non-competing products. If they can't make it free, then make it $1.

Except for games, which have a commercial nostalgia market, most software over 10-15 years old wouldn't be commercially viable even if it did run on the latest operating systems.

I for one would love to fire up Windows 3.1 with a 15 year old copy of Microsoft Word and print to my Postscript printer, just to see how fast it is on my modern PC.

Re:If only all orphaned software would go this rou

[swerk]

I heartily agree. I've been bitten many times by abandoned software, Animator Pro on DOS had a sort-of spiritual successor in Animator Studio, but it died there, lost between Windows 3.1 and 95. Blender was nearly lost to a similar fate; fortunately enough money was raised to buy out the source and release it under the GPL.

Being at the software vendor's mercy for an application's longevity sucks hard, and it's one of the reasons I've been embracing Free and open software so passionately. As long as anyone still cares, the program will live on. Good software shouldn't die. That said, anything related to FoxPro can and should be erased from existance as soon as possible as far as I'm concerned, but surely somebody's happy about this, so good for them.

Re:

[morcego]

Amusingly enough, if you run DOS on a virtual machine, it will peg your CPU even when sitting there at a prompt. If you run, say, Windows Server 2003 in a VM, CPU usage hovers around 10% when idle.

I assume there's some busy wait loop in DOS somewhere.

Try DOSIDLE: http://www.vmware.com/software/dosidle210.zip [vmware.com]

Re:

[justthinkit]

That link didn't work for me [404'd at vmware.com].

A HREF="http://ftp.bspu.unibel.by/pub/HardWare/COOLE RS/DOSidle/">This one did.

How's that relate to Jet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I might be able to feign some interest if they'd open source Jet (db used by Exchange)...

Re:

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Are you sure Exchange uses Jet?

Re:

[dedazo]

I think you're confusing "JET Blue" (ESE) with the file-based Jet RDBMS engine introduced by Microsoft Access in the 90s. Exchange uses the former, as do many of the new Windows client apps that shipped with Vista, though the API has been available for a while.

ESE might be based on Jet or it might be a superset of it or whatever, but I don't think they're the same thing.

Re:

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Aahhhhh -- that'd probably explain it!

I can't claim to really know much about either Access or Exchange, but I do seem to recall that Exchange (2000 anyway) did have some kind of transaction logging to allow atomic commits and backups whilst the system live. And I might be being mean to Access, but I thought did basically nothing in this respect!

Re:

[Volante3192]

I know Access uses JET, but I haven't run across anything saying Exchange uses it... If they did, I could use eseutil to fix this stupid broken Access mdb I was just told about today instead of the not-working jetcomp.exe tool.

Apparently ESE stands for Extensible Storage Engine as well...so I'm gonna have to say Exchange doesn't use JET.

Re:

[Volante3192]

Further comments, apparently ESE was meant to succeed the Access JET, but that didn't happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_En gine [wikipedia.org]

So it's apparently a flavor of JET...but different.

I could "see" them opening JET Red (Access) in about 10 years, because there are no plans to make it 64 bit, but not JET Blue (ESE/Exchange). That'd open up Exchange and MS wouldn't want to do that.

License

[MrWGW]

I don't suppose anyone knows what open source license the software in question was released under? I looked in the article, without success.

Probably the MOSL

[wiredog]

Microsoft Open Source License: You can look, but you can't touch.

Shared Source

[argent]

That was the first question that came to mind for me, too.

The relevant part of the actual announcement on Microsoft's site [microsoft.com] reads "To reiterate, today we are announcing that we are not planning on releasing a VFP 10 and will be releasing the completed Sedna work on CodePlex at no charge. The components written as part of Sedna will be placed in the community for further enhancement as part of our shared source initiative. You can expect to see the Sedna code on CodePlex sometime before the end of summer 2007."

Shared Source [microsoft.com] is not Open Source.

Re:

[Kalriath]

Parent is wrong. The Shared Source license linked to there ONLY applies to those with Windows Source Code access. The licenses you really want to look at are http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/l i censingbasics/sharedsourcelicenses.mspx [microsoft.com] - which in two of the three flavours allow modification and redistribution for both commercial and non-commercial use. The Ms-Pl is like a BSD license - essentially "do whatever, we don't care. We also grant you royalty free non-exclusive perpetual rights to

Re:

[argent]

Interesting.

The first two licenses are not GPL-compatible. They're compatible with the BSDL, but supercede it.

I'm not sure what kind of binary distribution license either permits. They both have a term to the effect that "If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license." In the case of the Ms-Cl, that seems clear enough, but for the Ms-Pl I'm not sure what this actually means.

Re:

[CSHARP123]

In the Shared Source Initiative there are licenses which are Just windows related. I am not sure they have stated which SSI license they will be using. Refer this link [microsoft.com] for all the different SSI licenses.
There is a good article about whether SSI is open source or not at this link [newsforge.com]. I am not sure if any of the license underneath SSI is classified as open source or not.

Re:

[rtb61]

Also it is only the 'core portions' what ever that means in microspeak.

Codeplex still stinks of, you code it so we can patent it. Typical condition for companies 'Microsoft reserves the right to update the TOU at any time without notice to you' (terms of use) or the right to delete the project at any time without notice.

So the headline M$ open source FoxPro DBMS is actually pretty far from reality.

one word...

[deander2]

license?

Status of "intellectual property"

[burnin1965]

It would be nice to see Microsoft start to open source (that is with a GPL or equivelant license) at least some of their products. But why FoxPro? This is the same software package which got Microsoft into trouble [foxprohistory.org] over copyrights. I believe all the "intellectual property" issues surrounding FoxPro have long been settled, am I right?

burnin

Crazy

[N8F8]

Between FoxPro and VB it just amazes me that any company can afford to repeatedly crap on it's customers and still survive.

Take Note!

[Nom du Keyboard]

Take note, Microsoft has (to appearances, at least, while waiting to see if they provide everything necessary to compile up and run the current FP release) done something good here. Would that all other software companies follow suit with orphaned software.

Re:

[iPaul]

Good question. I sometimes wonder what companies are hoping to get out of sitting on a piece of software for years, loosing the source code, and just preventing anyone from getting any use out of it? I actually had an opportunity to convert a fox-pro app to a web app, but the guy that had the app was insane and I would rather swallow my own tongue than deal with him.

What about Bob?

[RonMcMahon]

I guess there is still hope that they will FINALLY open up the code to Bob! I can hardly wait! I'm dizzy with excitement over how I can apply this awesome technology and UI breakthrough in my Vista apps!

A Brilliant Move?

[Ngarrang]

Micro$oft has stated in the past that if someone is going to pirate an OS, they would prefer it Windows, on the premise that the pirate (Arrrrrr!) could be converted into a paying user. Or at the minimum, allow Micro$oft to count the person as a user to tout how dominant their products.

So, we have here a product that Micro$oft already had other versions of, and wishes to no longer spend money on. Sooooo, is this yet another way of keeping the world on Micro$oft software? By making the source available, y

Irrelevant

[DaMattster]

Unfortunately, I would have to say Microsoft's actions are largely irrelevant. FoxPro was fantastic in its hay day but it is a bygone technology. I am not terribly familiar with FoxPro but I would wager, in its present inception, that it does not scale nearly as well as SQL. If the license is GPL or BSD, it could find a new lease on life in UNIX, FreeBSD, and Linux. I could see FoxPro being adapted as an LDAP backend or a configuration backend. But much beyond that, Microsoft is open sourcing FoxPro because there is little or no threat posed as the technology is, as the tag line points out, abandonware.

Please don't be to harsh when you mod me for this speculation: What if Microsoft open sources this product with a different goal in mind? For instance, maybe M$ is curious to see what new ideas become of their abandonware? Perhaps, the community might give it a new lease on life and re-develop a market for it? Should that happen M$ could close the source again, if the license is not GPL, LGPL, or BSD. Just my thoughts anyway

Re:

[Punchinello]

I think we need to give the open source community a bit more credit. I suspect someone much more cleaver than you and I will find a way to use the FoxPro source to create something useful (or at least to make us say, "gee whiz!"). Only time will tell, but we would never have known the potentoinal if the code base was simply abondoned. I welcome this move by MS and applaud them.

Cold

[kahrytan]

  I think Hell just froze over and a pig flew by my window. Why is Microsoft doing this? Perhaps to sponge off OSS developers then turn around and close source it.

DABO

[JShadow]

Well there it is! I worked with VFP starting with version 6, and when version 8 came out the rumors started flying about VFP being discontinued at some point. Microsoft fired back saying that the lack of VFP in Visual Studio didn't mean anything, and they would be continuing development and supporting all the VFP code out there for some time to come. Well, looks like the rumors were right.

And I really don't care, because when I started hearing those rumors I started searching for a replacement, just in

Re:

[Master of Transhuman]

Yeah, somebody else on a previous page referred to it, and I looked it up. It looks interesting.

The really interesting part is that's cross-platform and supports most of the OSS databases.

Linux really needs an easy to use "Access killer". Since Dabo supports MySQL and PostgreSQL and there are migration tools from others to migrate Access to OSS databases, this could be a very valuable product.

I haven't compared it yet to Kexi or the OpenOffice BASE, but if Dabo has the full VFP application development capab

Who really uses Visual FoxPro anyway?

[Orion Blastar]

I mean if someone admits to using Visual FoxPro they are usually laughed at. I think Visual FoxPro was the software least likely to be installed in the Visual Studio 6.0 and above suite of software.

I think the DOS version of Visual FoxPro was used to create Nursing software to answer questions about becoming an LPN, but after they moved from DOS to Windows they used something else.

If Microsoft wants to impress the open source crowd, they need to open source the core of Microsoft Access and release how the M

Re:Open source is not a verb

[aapold]

I'm glad we have someone to grammar our articles.

Re:

[lordSaurontheGreat]

Open source is not a verb

maybe that's why Microsoft is having so much trouble with OSS... they don't know what it is

Re:

[LadyLucky]

Verbing Weirds Nouns.

Re:Open source is not a verb

[L. VeGas]

Don't verb that adjective! It bad's the language.

Excuse me, I have to go full my belly.

Re:Open source is not a verb

[drix]

Actually, I think it richens the language.

Re:

[swerk]

Nouns get verbed all the time, get over it. ;^)

Re:

[koreth]

I'm normally a stickler for grammar but verbing [wikipedia.org] is a pretty widely accepted practice in colloquial English.

Re:

[civilizedINTENSITY]

"Open Source" might not be a verb yet, but it will be. Might need to concatenate it down to "opensource", first, though.

We'll verb it if we want to.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Open source is not a verb, dammit. Try "Microsoft to make FoxFro open source" or something like that. Arrgh!

I was under the impression that verbing adjectives was a construction in mainstream American English that is recognized as legitimate even by academics. (Verbing nouns is a legitimate construction in hacker slang, but that's a separate issue.)

However, even if it wasn't, American English does NOT have a regulatory body. It is, and always has been, what the users make of it. Academics must continuous

Woops. Noun phrase.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Sorry about the "adjective" part. (I started responding to one of the followup comments and pulled the "verbing an adjective" from there.)

"Open Source" is a noun phrase so verbing it is a proper construction of hacker slang. This seems appropriate, given that the whole open source movement was started by one or more of the original MIT Hackers. Since one of them coined it, and they habitually also used nouns as verbs (and vice-versa), they automatically coined the verb form simultaneously. This makes it

Re:

[icepick72]

Language changes over time and people make it change. Old English did not have the phrasing "I am going". There was no "am"'ing, "is"'ing or "are"'ing. Check out some Shakespeare. They only had things like "I go" "We go", "I will go" etc.
Some working is not commonly used anymore like "goeth", valid but just not used.
I don't mind "open source" turning into a verb. In fact, I would start to argue it's already commonly used that way as evidenced by the article post and elsewhere. It's becoming pervasive. You

Re:

[icepick72]

If I may refute my own post, I'm somewhat full of shit, not about language changing, but about Shakespeare. I just downloaded the complete works. He does use "am"'ing (e.g. "I am going, forsooth"). You have to go back even further to find such examples missing from the language. Maybe someone with more knowledge of the subject can provide more clarification. I'm done trying for now.

Re:

[rifter]

Some working is not commonly used anymore like "goeth", valid but just not used.

Actually we never lost "goeth," "hath," etc, we simply changed the common spelling. "th" became "s," and the pronunciation of the two was never far off. In fact in Castillian Spanish and similar variants they went the other way and pronounce words with "s" similarly to the way US English speakers pronounce "th." In any case it is true that the pronunciation of the two has diverged somewhat more in modern US English, enough s

Re:

[theshowmecanuck]

It's the shizzle.

Re:

[An ominous Cow art]

I've been programming in various versions of FP since 1989 or so (FoxBase+). Since the language is built around the idea of manipulating tables, doing so is incredibly easy compared to the awful hoops you have to jump through in more modern or general purpose languages (Java, perl, python, C/C++).

That said, it feels very dated working in VFP. Especially with things like arrays, which are horribly crippled compared to the equivalent in perl or python. VFP's OO-ness isn't all it could be, either. I'd hop

Re:

[vertinox]

I used to work for for a FoxPro developer back in 2001.

It was rather a fun and useful software and a whole lot nicer to work with than say MS Access at the time if you were developing your own database software.

I even got to attend a developers conference with them (I did training for them and support) and there were plenty of people that did Fox Pro.

However, they did have a contingency plan to switch all their products to MS SQL based solutions which I don't know how that went since I left the company.

It h

Re:

[jdbartlett]

I had a brief stint at a small company producing bespoke accounting solutions for Pegasus Opera, a VFP-based package. Its briefness was due to dwindling demand... Since then, I've moved to the US, and if I ever happen to mention either Fox Pro or Pegasus, I get "Huh? The what-what?"

Re:

[iPaul]

I've come accross one instance of a FoxPro app that the owner wanted to re-write as a web app. It would really help open up solutions for people with existing FP apps that need to migrate them to something, anything else.

Re:

[Ced_Ex]

*raises hand*

FoxPro for DOS 2.6

But it's not my choice! Stupid application still works like a charm. Whoever wrote it back in '92 did a pretty decent job overall. New enhancements are written by me grudgingly. A re-write is in the pipes, so I'll be looking forward to turning it into a web app and be done with it.

Re:what's next? - A Solaris Runtime web app!

[Havokmon]

FoxPro for DOS 2.6

But it's not my choice! Stupid application still works like a charm. Whoever wrote it back in '92 did a pretty decent job overall. New enhancements are written by me grudgingly. A re-write is in the pipes, so I'll be looking forward to turning it into a web app and be done with it.

FoShizzle! Don't rewrite that app! Just use the solaris RunTime and run it on Linux. Output your screens in HTML, and make it a webapp on Linux!

Yes. I did that:
http://www.havokmon.com/stuff/wor [havokmon.com]

Re:

[Ced_Ex]

That's a nice idea, but since I didn't have a choice with the FoxPro, I highly doubt I'll have the choice with Linux. :(

(XBase was cool!) Re:what's next?

[Tablizer]

FoxPro? Who still uses FoxPro?! What ancient MS product is next?...

Although they never got their GUI conventions right, the XBase language was outstanding for ad-hoc and small-scale data chomping. You can tell it was invented by people who had to deal with data and tables all day long.

Unlike MS-Access, there was an easy path to ad-hoc manipulations and script writing. In MS-Access the language world and mouse world are too distinct. Xbase allows a more incrimental, integrated approach.

And unlike SQL, it easily allows one to do cursor-oriented manipulation and see intermediate results. Sometimes cursoring around is easier than bulk, declaritive queries that SQL gives you. Newer dialects of XBase incorporated SQL to allow one to use whichever is best for a task. (However, index dictionaries were never standardized across dialects.)

I used to do all kinds of table-oriented stuff in XBase, like store programming code or expressions in the tables. Think of it as Design Patterns where you can easily query, search, and print the patterns rather than dig thru linear code. It was also easy to generate tables programatically. Meta-programming was a snap. Data dictionaries could drive a lot of the app, even the GUI.

The newer stuff tends to put bulky API's between you and the data, which slows one down. There is no such fense in Xbase (usually a good thing for productivity, but it does have its downsides if you are not careful and not used to it.)

Ah, the good ol' days. -Tablizer-
       

Re:

[justthinkit]

SBT [accpac.com] (now owned by AccPac) accounting software runs on FoxPro and Visual FoxPro. Many many companies run this, and the support of these systems is a good business to be in.

The strange thing is that just yesterday [slashdot.org] I was commenting on how FoxPro was all but ignored by Microsoft.

Anyway, that's who still uses it...

Re:

[Master of Transhuman]

IIRC, the DV8 superhero (or supervillains, actually, since they started out as villains) comic book had a nutcase named "Bob" who wandered around with the head of an ex-girlfriend under his arm.

Maybe that's where the authors got the name from.

Re:glad to see foxpro dead

[dheera]

This is probably a money-making plot on Microsoft's part. They will "open source" it, but then when you read the million pages of fine print, you find out that it isn't open-sourced under GPL, but instead, they'll probably rather put it under one of their own crafted licenses that says that if you modify and redistribute and portions of the code, you must include the string "I like porcupines" and a link to the Microsoft homepage.

And then when someone does redistribute it like other source code (without reading the M$ license), they'll sit quietly for about 3 or 4 years, while this person's redistributed code becomes ever more popular. Eventually, it will become incorporated in digital cameras worldwide, database software that drives the next Google, and your next-generation toaster.

Approximately 1 year after that happens, and $1 billion have been made off the redistributed code, Microsoft will sue for not following the license. They will cite the fact that "I like porcupines" is not in the code and that a link to the Microsoft homepage is not included. They will complain that the lack of a link to Microsoft will have decreased Vista sales by $3 billion (because, naturally, the price of their OS is probably 3 times that of the code in question). They will demand the profits, win the case, and said company will have the option of either paying the legal fees, or being bought out by Microsoft.

On another note, "open source" of itself does not always mean "free to redistribute", it just means you get to view the source.

Re:

[Raenex]

On another note, "open source" of itself does not always mean "free to redistribute", it just means you get to view the source.

Wrong. See the definition [opensource.org].

Re:

[pfleming]

You don't really expect MS to follow an accepted definition of "Open Source" do you?

Re:

[Master of Transhuman]

Yes, I used FoxPro back in the early nineties. It was a great product under Fox, but when Microsoft purchased it, they supported it only for a while, then let it languish while they pushed Access (an UTTER POS with all the "reliability" and brain-dead design decisions Microsoft is known for).

I was at a computer show in San Francisco standing at the FoxPro booth actually when I heard that Microsoft had bought them.

But I don't think the "Jet" engine came from Foxpro. I might be wrong about that. I think the A

Re:

[ggeens]

Didn't MS just buy FoxPro, to steal the 'jet' engine from it to stick into access?

A few years ago, I ran into a couple of FoxPro-based applications and I learned a little about the history of the product.

FoxPro was rather popular with application writers and there are still a lot of small business applications based on it. Apart from the technical merits, it had one big advantage over MS Access: you could bundle FoxPro with your application for free, while Access required an Office license for each PC.

Microsoft bought the company mainly to destroy a competitor. They ended up suppor

Your Comment is Incoherent

[sweatyboatman]

FoxPro is glacially slow. Its proponents will swear up and down that it's the fastest database environment in the world, but the reality is that it's only fast at running FoxPro code.

It's only fast at running code in it's own language? You don't say! I'd be pretty impressed at any language that could run code written in another language.

Perhaps what you meant to say was that Foxpro is only fast when dealing with data. In that case you are correct. I wouldn't write a protein-folding program in Foxpro, be

Re:

[Just Some Guy]

It's only fast at running code in it's own language? You don't say!

I do say. It's not a fast database. It's not a particularly nice programming environment. It has little support for any kind of ACID goodness, and then only in the very newest release (which isn't completely backward compatible with its predecessors). No, it's true that the only thing FoxPro is particularly good at is running FoxPro code. Unless you have legacy FP applications to support, it has absolutely nothing to offer.

But there'

Your Comment is Still Incoherent

[sweatyboatman]

You seem to not understand that saying that Foxpro is only good at running Foxpro code makes no sense. .NET is only good at running .NET code. And Python is only good at running Python code.

The mistake you're making is that you look at VFP and you see a DBMS package that's forcing you to program in Foxpro. You have it backwards. VFP's DBMS system is an extra bonus (especially if you're at a company that doesn't have the resources or the need for a SQL Server/PostgreSQL database).

Yes, all the BDMS systems

Re:

[Just Some Guy]

You seem to not understand that saying that Foxpro is only good at running Foxpro code makes no sense.

It was a literary device aimed at native English speakers, and I apologize for any confusion it might have caused.

But PostgreSQL isn't a programming language and Python isn't a database language. Whereas VFP is both.

The key distinction is that Python isn't a crappy database - it doesn't pretend to be one at all - and PostgreSQL isn't a crappy programming language - it doesn't even try. Combining an aw

Re:

[Master of Transhuman]

Well, the proponents here have given examples of relatively large databases being accessed by multiple users with one second query times, so I'd have to say that you give no evidence that FoxPro is "slow" - even relatively, which it probably is.

As for FoxPro's LANGUAGE speed, as opposed to its DATABASE QUERY speed, you may well be right that it's slow. No surprise there, really. Obviously anything written in a modern computer language is going to outperform something written in a language that was designed

Re:

[trongey]

I suppose the 3 users of FoxPro are totally gonna be stoked on this...

They would, but all three of them died in a freak accident last week. Details are still fuzzy, but it apparently involved COBOL and Turbo Basic.

Re:

[Master of Transhuman]

I'm not.

We need one. Dabo might be it - or not - I don't know yet.

There are migration tools to get Access data into MySQL and PostgreSQL. What we need is an easy to use application development environment that can match the ability to generate screens and reports that Access has - without the crap.