This article will slightly be more technical than usual. One of the things that have been announced of Microsoft especially in their Mix 07 event was that Microsoft is planning to make a version of its Common Language Runtime ( CLR) available for cross platform.
What does it mean for you and me? The CLR is the heart of Microsoft’s .NET framework programming model. It is the programming and software development tool of choice for Windows, and of late, have become even more popular than Java. By making this cross platform ( or at least allowing other companies to connect to it), it means that millions of .NET developers can now more easily write software for non windows environments.
That means that more and more, Microsoft is more open and supporting more different platforms. This is significant. In fact, one of the blogs that I recently came across even blatantly argues that Microsoft does not really hate open source. IN fact, open source does something for Microsoft – it keeps them in the news. If you look at the internet, thousands of articles come out every month debating open source versus Microsoft, and this is all free publicity to keep Microsoft in the mindshare of many people. Without such fight, Microsoft may appear in the news ,and in the internet much less.
What he argues is that all these different open source programs ( many of which runs on top of Microsoft) actually contributes to Microsoft’s revenues. The product that threatens Microsoft is one of the open source called Linux. Arguably, this is one of the few products, by virtue of it being more mature, have a larger support, and better financed, have a better chance of threatening two of Microsoft’s core products ( Windows Vista, and Windows Server). The others are arguably less so, unless they help the Linux platform.
One of the websites that have intrigued me is a website that is petitioning for the continuation of visual Foxpro. Visual Foxpro if you recall, was a database development platform that is a variant of the foremost development platform of choice during the 1980s, which was dBAse and Clipper. Foxpro was later bought by Microsoft in the early 1990s. However, in recent years, due to some developments, Foxpro has started to become less and less popular. Last month, in March, Microsoft announce that it would not release a new version of the product ( however, they will support the product until 2015).
There are still many foxpro enthusiasts. Most recently, a website was set up, and a petition was starting to be signed to convince Microsoft to release Version 10 which was already long expected by everybody). If you go to the site, you will note that as of this writing, there are now 3,537 developers who signed the petition, who collectively, according to the website, developed over applications that runs in over 75 thousand servers and 822,000 computers.
The people who signed comes from almost 80 countries worldwide, and it is especially noticeable of where the tool is really popular ( the developing countries). If you note, there were only 341 programmers from the United States, 90 from Germany and 42 from United Kingdom who signed. In contrast, 479 developers from Russia, 280 from China, 294 from Argentina, 150 from Brazil, 156 from Peru, and 109 from Ukraine signed. If you want to know, there were 38 developers from the Philippines , including two from Cebu, who also signed the petition.
If you are a Visual Foxpro enthusiast, you may want to visit the website at http://www.masfoxpro.com This is Spanish for More Foxpro, which incidentally is what is the purpose of the site – to petition Microsoft to continue to release and support the product.