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."

Comments

Umm, no.

[dudeman2]

See first comment in the article by a Microsoftie:

NOTE that the released part is Sedna and NOT VFP nor VFP core elements!

Sedna is a project Microsoft has been working on for the past year or so. Sedna is built using the extensibility model of VFP9 and provides features like better connectivity to SQL Server, integration with parts of the .NET framework, wrappers for Vista APIs to make it easier to write applications that run on Vista machines, as well as better support for VFP data in Visual Studio.
 

Rushmore technology anyone?

[wandazulu]

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.

Re:Rushmore technology anyone?

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Re:Rushmore technology anyone?

[k12linux]

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?

Re:Rushmore technology anyone?

[Just Some Guy]

Queries were lightning fast if you didn't match too many rows and the query was optimized to work with your indexes.

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.

If only all orphaned software would go this route

[davidwr]

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.

Re:Open source is not a verb

[aapold]

I'm glad we have someone to grammar our articles.

Re:Open source is not a verb

[L. VeGas]

Don't verb that adjective! It bad's the language.

Excuse me, I have to go full my belly.

Shared Source

[argent]

That was the first question that came to mind for me, too.

The relevant part of the actual announcement on Microsoft's site reads "To reiterate, today we are announcing that we are not planning on releasing a VFP 10 and will be releasing the completed Sedna work on CodePlex at no charge. The components written as part of Sedna will be placed in the community for further enhancement as part of our shared source initiative. You can expect to see the Sedna code on CodePlex sometime before the end of summer 2007."

Shared Source is not Open Source.

Re:Umm, still no

[sweatyboatman]

The article is vague and misleading. Alan Griver (who heads Microsoft's VFP team has been talking alot on his blog about it). Here's the straight-dope...

How about open sourcing the core product too?
We've been asked this for years. That's not going to happen. The main reason is that there is too much intellectual property in the VFP core codebase.

That seems pretty definitive to me.

For clarification: Sedna (the stuff that's going into CodePlex) is not now (nor was it ever intended to be) the next version of Visual Foxpro. It's just a set of VFP-based tools intended to help current VFP developers to make better use of new features in Vista/SQL Server/etc...

Meanwhile, VFP 9 is getting a final service pack and then that's it as far as Microsoft is concerned. There's certainly no plans to open-source the IDE or the VFP engine because, frankly, Microsoft would never do that. Some of the technology (and people) from VFP is going towards the LINQ project, but .NET is still a long way from offering the kind of streamlined data-oriented programming that Foxpro offers.

Re:glad to see foxpro dead

[dheera]

This is probably a money-making plot on Microsoft's part. They will "open source" it, but then when you read the million pages of fine print, you find out that it isn't open-sourced under GPL, but instead, they'll probably rather put it under one of their own crafted licenses that says that if you modify and redistribute and portions of the code, you must include the string "I like porcupines" and a link to the Microsoft homepage.

And then when someone does redistribute it like other source code (without reading the M$ license), they'll sit quietly for about 3 or 4 years, while this person's redistributed code becomes ever more popular. Eventually, it will become incorporated in digital cameras worldwide, database software that drives the next Google, and your next-generation toaster.

Approximately 1 year after that happens, and $1 billion have been made off the redistributed code, Microsoft will sue for not following the license. They will cite the fact that "I like porcupines" is not in the code and that a link to the Microsoft homepage is not included. They will complain that the lack of a link to Microsoft will have decreased Vista sales by $3 billion (because, naturally, the price of their OS is probably 3 times that of the code in question). They will demand the profits, win the case, and said company will have the option of either paying the legal fees, or being bought out by Microsoft.

On another note, "open source" of itself does not always mean "free to redistribute", it just means you get to view the source.