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Microsoft to Open Source FoxPro

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the better-than-the-circular-file dept.

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."

10 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Rushmore technology anyone? by wandazulu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Will the Rushmore technology that was so attractive to Microsoft in the first place be included in whatever they release? The way I understand it, Microsoft bought FoxPro from FoxBase to get Rushmore to add to Access 2, and then they wanted to dump FP. Apparently there was such a vocal outcry that they've kept FoxPro going, until now.

    I'm curious because I really want to know what made FoxPro the speed demon it's always purported to be. I read somewhere that it was the first dbase-class database program that used bitmap indexes, but that was contradicted by another article from somewhere else.

    1. Re:Rushmore technology anyone? by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm curious because I really want to know what made FoxPro the speed demon it's always purported to be.

      It's not. It may be quick for the common case of a small table (10K lines) on a local drive, but move outside that and it's horrid. FP supports multi-user access by putting the data files on a network drive. If you want to query it, your machine has to read to entire file, throw out the lines it doesn't want, and present the results. My company has about 40 people using the same legacy FP database from a RAID 1+0 system over gigabit ethernet, and it's still hundreds of times slower than running similar queries via SQL to any "real" database.

      Let me put it this way: I wrote a program to export our FP tables to tab-delimited text files and then import those into PostgreSQL. This takes about 25 minutes, and we run it hourly - and it's still worth the pain. Reports altered to query PostgreSQL instead of FP typically see speedups of several hundred times, multiple users can run the same reports simultaneously, and you can actually run the reports over a slow link since only the query and resultsets have to traverse the network instead of the whole table.

      I know this will come across as flamebait, and I'd normally not say this, but anyone who claims that FoxPro is fast is a hobbyist programmer. It's simply not fast by any imaginable standard other than the trivial case of small files on a single user's drive.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    2. Re:Rushmore technology anyone? by mplemmons · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yup, Visual Foxpro was fast as hell, although IMO the speed topped out around version 3. And not just fast on rinky-dink tables, as long as they were reasonably indexed. Stick the server component of a c/s solution on the same server as where the data resides, and performance was great for tables having over 1M records. It was a good on the "back end" of web servers, for example.

      More than speed though, I enjoyed the data-centric programming language. It was a joy to use and a bunch of functionality could be smashed into just a few lines of code. I miss it.

      I think the real reason for it's demise is that it was cutting into the per-seat profits of SQL Server. Throw a VFP application on a file server and it was available to a bunch of users for free. We still use a server-based app where I work that is run several thousand times per month, trouble-free.

  2. How's that relate to Jet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I might be able to feign some interest if they'd open source Jet (db used by Exchange)...

  3. Re:Foxpro by An+ominous+Cow+art · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been programming in various versions of FP since 1989 or so (FoxBase+). Since the language is built around the idea of manipulating tables, doing so is incredibly easy compared to the awful hoops you have to jump through in more modern or general purpose languages (Java, perl, python, C/C++).

    That said, it feels very dated working in VFP. Especially with things like arrays, which are horribly crippled compared to the equivalent in perl or python. VFP's OO-ness isn't all it could be, either. I'd hoped the 'open source' part of the announcement would mean someone (maybe I?) would be able to add associative arrays to the language, but there is some confusion about whether VFP itself or some derivative called 'Sedna' is actually being open sourced. I need to find out more.

  4. Status of "intellectual property" by burnin1965 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It would be nice to see Microsoft start to open source (that is with a GPL or equivelant license) at least some of their products. But why FoxPro? This is the same software package which got Microsoft into trouble over copyrights. I believe all the "intellectual property" issues surrounding FoxPro have long been settled, am I right?

    burnin

  5. Take Note! by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Take note, Microsoft has (to appearances, at least, while waiting to see if they provide everything necessary to compile up and run the current FP release) done something good here. Would that all other software companies follow suit with orphaned software.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  6. Re:what's next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Actually, the computer at the store where I work is a DOS 386 that runs Foxpro to track orders and sales, with a sneakernet connection to a WinNT 486 downstairs. It's very retro. I found a 1200 bps modem tucked behind it while tidying up one day.

    So basically, very rare small businesses. But I think the main draw would be for people who wanted to read old files.

  7. Irrelevant by DaMattster · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Unfortunately, I would have to say Microsoft's actions are largely irrelevant. FoxPro was fantastic in its hay day but it is a bygone technology. I am not terribly familiar with FoxPro but I would wager, in its present inception, that it does not scale nearly as well as SQL. If the license is GPL or BSD, it could find a new lease on life in UNIX, FreeBSD, and Linux. I could see FoxPro being adapted as an LDAP backend or a configuration backend. But much beyond that, Microsoft is open sourcing FoxPro because there is little or no threat posed as the technology is, as the tag line points out, abandonware.

    Please don't be to harsh when you mod me for this speculation: What if Microsoft open sources this product with a different goal in mind? For instance, maybe M$ is curious to see what new ideas become of their abandonware? Perhaps, the community might give it a new lease on life and re-develop a market for it? Should that happen M$ could close the source again, if the license is not GPL, LGPL, or BSD. Just my thoughts anyway

  8. DABO by JShadow · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well there it is! I worked with VFP starting with version 6, and when version 8 came out the rumors started flying about VFP being discontinued at some point. Microsoft fired back saying that the lack of VFP in Visual Studio didn't mean anything, and they would be continuing development and supporting all the VFP code out there for some time to come. Well, looks like the rumors were right.

    And I really don't care, because when I started hearing those rumors I started searching for a replacement, just in case. I found DABO, which was created by a couple of VFP supporters from back in the day. It's built on Python, has a data model which mimics in many ways the simplicity and robustness of VFP. Plus it can use any database for the back end! It's open source, free, and getting better all the time; and it's not even at version 1 yet! I've only been tinkering with DABO, but now it's time to move.