Submission + - Microsoft rejects Visual FoxPro user petition
PetManimal writes: "Computerworld reports that Microsoft has rejected a user petition signed by 2,400 people calling on the company to continue developing Visual FoxPro. Microsoft, which bought FoxBASE back in 1992, has said it will support Visual FoxPro users until 2015, and has open-sourced some VFP tools, but after this summer's release of Service Pack 2 for Visual FoxPro 9, will terminate development — i.e., there will be no Visual FoxPro 10. Jay Roxe, Microsoft's group product manager for Visual Studio, cited several reasons for the decision:
The article adds that while interest in Visual FoxPro has begun to drop in the United States, the database programming tool/language remains a 'rock star' in China and Eastern Europe. The user petition wiki was created by Spanish developers, and contains a letter that says '.NET still lacks many of the better features that Visual FoxPro has in it for years'. The petition suggested that MS open source the full Visual FoxPro source code or form a partnership with a third party to continue Visual FoxPro development."For Microsoft to continue to evolve the FoxPro base, we would need to look at creating a 64-bit development environment, and that would involve an almost complete rewrite of the core product.... As far as forming a partnership with a third party is concerned, we've heard from a number of large FoxPro customers that this would make it impossible for them to continue to use FoxPro since it would no longer be from an approved vendor. We felt that putting the environment into open source on CodePlex, which balances the needs of both the community and the large customers, was the best path forward.