Industry News

Editors' Note: This article has beenupdated with an addendum since its original posting.

It started out in an unassuming manner: an industriousdeveloper, Paul McNett, had a growing interest in Linux. He beganplaying around with the open-source implementation of Windows forLinux calledWINE andwondered how his favorite development tool,Microsoft VisualFoxPro, would run. It was slow going at first, but Paulpersisted. He tracked down problems and submitted them to the WINEteam. Little by little the problems were corrected, until Paulfinally was able to run Visual FoxPro under WINE. He began tellingother VFP developers about his work, and many were interested inlearning more.

One such person was Whil Hentzen. Whil is the editor ofFoxTalkmagazine, a multiple-year recipient of the MicrosoftMostValuable Professional award, book publisher, host of hisown FoxPro conference and the first ever recipient of theFoxProCommunity Lifetime Achievement Award. Whil asked Paul towrite an article detailing his work for FoxTalk, and Paul agreed.Whil also began incorporating a demo of Visual FoxPro running underWINE into his presentations at conferences and user groupmeetings.

Whil was scheduled to give one such presentation recently totheBay Area Association ofDatabase Developers (BAADD). Shortly before hispresentation, however, he received a phone call from a manager atMicrosoft, who informed Whil that the material covered in Paul'sFoxTalk article was in violation of theEULA(End-User License Agreement). As Whil was in the middle of dinner,the conversation was short and ended with a request for Microsoft'slegal department to document its objection in writing.Understandably reluctant to incur the wrath of Microsoft'sseemingly bottomless supply of lawyers, Whil did not demo VFP underWINE that night, but simply explained to the audience the reasonwhy he couldn't.

That didn't sit well with some members of the audience. Oneof them, Chet Gardiner, immediately fired off an e-mail to theProFox mail list expressing his outrage with the heavy hand ofMicrosoft. His message in turn raised the ire of others, and angerover this issue began to grow. The manager at Microsoft who madethe initial call, Ken Levy, then refined his comments to state thatwhile it was okay to run a fully licensed copy of Visual FoxProunder WINE, it was a violation to distribute the applications builtwith Visual FoxPro to be run under WINE. Because VFP is a tool forgenerating applications, this seemed like a blatant tying of anapplication to the operating system, one of the things prohibitedby US anti-trust laws for monopolies such as Microsoft. Needless tosay, that clarification didn't do much to settle the issue.

In the past few weeks, this story has appeared onTheRegister,Slashdot,LinuxWorldand even the German publicationHeiseOnline. That's pretty amazing considering Microsoft hasdone its best the last few years to keep Visual FoxPro, one of itsmost powerful development tools, off the radar screen. Why wouldthey do that? One simple reason: money. An application developed inVisual FoxPro is much more economical for a business, as VisualFoxPro has its own data handling and storage capabilities. Contrastthat with the much more popular tool Visual Basic, which requires aseparate data engine (usually Microsoft SQL Server). Microsoftmakes a lot more money selling licenses for SQL Server, which arequite expensive, than they do when VFP applications aredistributed, requiring no additional license fees. So whichsolution do you think Microsoft is going to promote? The fact thatVisual FoxPro has a rich set of development tools and a robustobject-oriented programming language doesn't concern them; theysimply want the highest license fees they can squeeze out of theircustomers.

Why should any of this concern Linux users? After all, we'retalking about a Microsoft product. For starters, I think thissituation shows that Microsoft truly is afraid of Linux's potentialon the desktop. For them to add this restriction starting in 2001certainly suggests that someone in Redmond recognized the threatposed by Linux.

Secondly, if it does become possible to run the executablesunder Linux with no Windows licensing fees, a lot of companieswould certainly see the benefit in switching. Many of my clientshave their business applications running on hundreds of machinesthroughout their sites, systems that do not run anything else. Theyhave no reason to pay for a Windows license besides being able torun this single application. They literally could save thousands ofdollars by switching to Linux/WINE, resulting in Linux's entry intomany traditional Windows shops.

But what sort of companies are we talking about here?Probably some Mom-and-Pop businesses that use VFP applicationsbecause they couldn't afford a "real" tool, right? Wrong. VisualFoxPro has been used to develop mission-critical applications forsome of the largest companies around. I personally have developedVFP applications for AT&T, 3M, Daimler-Chrysler, Ogilvy &Mather and Pitney Bowes. If you're not familiar with Visual FoxPro,you owe it to yourself to give it an in-depth look.

For now, we wait for the pronouncements from the MicrosoftLegal department on its exact interpretation of the EULA, which isquite vague and offers numerous loopholes that developers and theirclients can invoke to implement a Linux/WINE solution. Will this bethe start of another set of anti-trust violations by Microsoft, orwill it quickly fade away and be forgotten? Like most VFPdevelopers, I'm waiting for Microsoft to make the next move.

Since this article was originally written, Microsoft didindeed respond to the request for a clarification of the EULAterms, but it did not actually clarify anything. Here's thewording:

So instead of clarifying, Microsoft simply passed the buckand told us to get lawyers to interpret the meaning of thecontract. Well, one lawyer did exactly that: John T. Mitchell, anattorney in the Washington, D.C., area who specializes in copyrightlaw, picked up the story fromThe Register. Hewrote a piece on his web site that warns Microsoft risksinvalidating its abilities to enforce its legitimate rights undercopyright law by trying to enforce "rights" that legally are nottheirs. You can read his writing, titled"MicrosoftRisks Copyright Impotence", along with a more detailedelaboration of the legal basis for his opinion in ane-mailposted to ProFox, an mail list for Visual FoxPro support. I am nota lawyer, but his reasoning and examples are clear and easy tofollow.

This controversy also seems to have breathed some life intothe Visual FoxPro market. People who had never heard about theproduct or had assumed it died a long time ago wondered what allthe fuss was about. Numerous developers report an increase ininquiries, and membership on the ProFox mail list, which I host,has increased by 10%. If this persists, the controversy might endup costing Microsoft in ways they never anticipated, as more andmore companies learn of a tool that can develop data-intenseapplications for a fraction of what they would pay in license feesfor a Visual Studio/SQL Server solution.

Ed Leafe is a cross-platformsort of guy, who works in OS X, Linux and Windows about equally. Heis a long-time Visual FoxPro developer and has received theMicrosoft Most Valuable Professional award for each of the pastnine years. He also runs theOpenTech Forum,where people with both Visual FoxPro and Linux questions can go forsupport.