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Aufruf zur Teilnahme an MasFoxPro- #6782 in section [699400] |
| Sec: |
(51) MS-Visual FoxPro 9.0 |
| Von: |
Rainer Becker [dFPUG] |
| An: |
All |
| Am/Um: |
28.03.2007 01:33:00 gelesen |
MasFoxPro (MoreFoxPro) demmands the developer community to Microsoft
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March 22th, 2007, began a world wide community campaign aimed to ask Microsoft to continue Visual FoxPro development.
Campaign is located here: http://www.masfoxpro.com
How it started?
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This starts with the announcement done by MS Group Manager Yair Alan Griver talking about no-new Visual FoxPro future development. This was published here: http://blogs.msdn.com/yag/archive/2007/03/13/message-to-the-vfp-community.aspx
and http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb308952.aspx
In both announcements, there is not a convincing explanation or logical reason about why Microsoft decided not to continue Visual FoxPro future development.
This campaign was created as an idea originated in the Spanish FoxPro Microsoft newsgroups, where many people expressed his anger and sadness regarding the Microsoft announcement. PortalFox and the MVPs that manage PortalFox, thinking in that they are part of the community, decided to offer a way (hosting and support) for let the community to express itself and promotes this campaign.
This campaign is named MasFoxPro, due to the origin of it. Mas stands for more in Spanish.
The promoters of this campaign suppose that many FoxPro users groups worldwide will support the campaign because they are based in the community and the community is asking for any kind of action. Users group support is done at: http://www.masfoxpro.com/Sponsors
MasFoxPro is not limited to Spanish speaking developers, the goal is to expand the campaign worldwide to any user or users group that have a FoxPro activity, even to people that sympathizes with Visual FoxPro.
Why the need for this campaign?
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This announcement has been a big hit to the FoxPro community. Specially for the mid and small developers (the wide majority of developers in Visual FoxPro), that have many years of Visual FoxPro code and hardly can manage to handle the move to the recommended development environment that Microsoft promotes (.NET). The community is rethinking his future development platform. Many developers are thinking in moving to Linux development, some to .NET and others to various development environments ranging from Xbase clones to Open Source like PHP, Pyhton and Ruby.
Developers sell OS products, so Visual FoxPro developers sell Windows and Office products. Apple forgot this some years ago, but now they are changing his mind.
Sedna, VFPx and VFPy are good initiatives but with an ended product. A software company cannot compete with a Visual FoxPro app when the competitors can say "It's developed with a product with no more core upgrades".
NET still lacks of the better features that Visual FoxPro has in it years ago, although Microsoft is implementing into another products some of the FoxPro power (Rushmore, LINQ, ...). Things that take weeks in .NET are done in Visual FoxPro in days. Dealing with data is far more complicated with NET than with Visual FoxPro. We are talking mainly about developer productivity and easy of development. From a Visual FoxPro developer perspective .NET is a step backwards.
Microsoft will benefit having another development group rather than a monolithic way of doing the things. Another development group like the FoxTeam gives more rich to other developer products, is far way better to have more different points of views for solving a problem. And Microsoft can deal with this budget dress.
Objectives
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They main objetive is that Microsoft continues with the development of Visual FoxPro. There are four possibilities that can fit with the community needs and is Microsoft hands:
- continuing the Visual FoxPro development
- releasing it to Open Source (even restricted in any way) the Visual FoxPro full source code
- doing an agreement with a third party for this third party continues the Visual FoxPro development
- selling the Visual FoxPro to another company
Campaign dissected
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It doesn't only cover a petition, all of the actions are relevant
- Gathering Petition Signups
- Email and phone calls to Microsoft subsidiaries
- Individual mail to Microsoft executives (Executives, Business Group, Community and Developer related people)
- Announcing the campaign over internet, blogs, web sites and press
- Submitting opinions in the Alan Griver's blog
PD: PortalFox is the main Spanish speaking developers portal in Visual FoxPro. Actually counts with over than 28.000 registered users worldwide, is know friendly as "El Portal del Pueblo" (People's Portal), more info regarding PortalFox at:
http://www.masfoxpro.com/PortalFox
http://www.portalfox.com
For more info regarding the MasFoxPro campaign go to his website (http://www.masfoxpro.com) or contact with managers@masfoxpro.com
Mit freundlichen Grüssen,
Rainer Becker
dFPUG c/o ISYS GmbH
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