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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."
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I don't suppose anyone knows what open source license the software in question was released under? I looked in the article, without success.
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.
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?
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, because, well, that would be stupid. But there's no language in the world that works with data as well as FP.
Fortunately for you, though, Microsoft is not really making anything of significance open-source. Though Foxpro's death will only be assured when they turn out the lights in 2015.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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-
Table-ized A.I.
maybe that's why Microsoft is having so much trouble with OSS... they don't know what it is
Consider yourself spoken to.