Masfoxpropress
De MasFoxPro Wiki
MasFoxPro (MoreFoxPro) demands of the developer community to Microsoft
March 22th, 2007, a world wide community campaign aimed at asking Microsoft to continue Visual FoxPro development.
Campaign began. It is located here:
Tabla de contenidos |
How did it start?
This started with the announcement made by Microsoft saying that there would be no new version Visual FoxPro. This announcement was published here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb308952.aspx
This announcement lacks a convincing explanation or logical reason as to why Microsoft decided not to release version 10 of Visual FoxPro.
This campaign was created as an idea that originated in the Spanish FoxPro Microsoft newsgroups, where many people expressed anger and sadness regarding the Microsoft announcement. PortalFox and the MVPs that manage PortalFox, as a part of the community, decided to offer a way (hosting and support) to let the community to express itself and promote this campaign.
This campaign is named MasFoxPro because of its Spanish origin. Mas means more in Spanish. It's a worldwide campaign and not specific to any single user group.
The promoters of this campaign hope that many FoxPro user groups worldwide will support the campaign because they are part of the community and the community is asking for some kind of action. User groups can show their support 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 user group that have a vested interest in keeping FoxPro alive.
Why the need for this campaign?
This announcement has been a major blow to the FoxPro community. This is especially true for the medium and small application developers (the vast majority of developers in Visual FoxPro), that have many years of Visual FoxPro code. It is not practical or cost effective to attempt to move these applications to Microsoft's recommended development environment (.NET). The community is rethinking its future development platform. Many developers are thinking of moving to Linux development, some to .NET and others to various development environments ranging from Xbase clones to Open Source such as 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 their mind.
Sedna, VFPx and VFPy are good initiatives but with a dying product. A software company cannot sell a Visual FoxPro business solution when the competitors can say "It's developed with a product with no more core upgrades".
.NET still lacks many of the better features that Visual FoxPro has in it for years, although Microsoft is implementing some of FoxPro's power (Rushmore, LINQ, ...) into other products. Things that take weeks in .NET can be accomplished 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 more than one application development environment group. Having multiple points of view provides a much more efficient way to solve problems. And since the budget for maintaining the Foxteam is so small, that does not pose a huge financial burden for Microsoft.
Objectives
The main objective is to persuade Microsoft to release veriosn 10 Visual FoxPro. There are four possibilities that can address the community needs and is in 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 so that this third party can continue Visual FoxPro development
- selling the Visual FoxPro to another company
Campaign dissected
It doesn't only cover a petition, all of the actions are relevant
- Gathering Petition Signatures
- 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. With over than 28,000 registered users worldwide, is affectionately known as "El Portal del Pueblo" (People's Portal). More info regarding PortalFox can be found at:
http://www.masfoxpro.com/PortalFox
For more info regarding the MasFoxPro campaign go to his website (http://www.masfoxpro.com) or contact with managers@masfoxpro.com
