Visual FoxPro for Linux: A Violation of the EULA?

It started out in an unassuming manner: an industrious developer, Paul McNett, had a growing interest in Linux. He began playing around with the open-source implementation of Windows for Linux called WINE and wondered how his favorite development tool, Microsoft Visual FoxPro, would run. It was slow going at first, but Paul persisted. He tracked down problems and submitted them to the WINE team. Little by little the problems were corrected, until Paul finally was able to run Visual FoxPro under WINE. He began telling other VFP developers about his work, and many were interested in learning more.

One such person was Whil Hentzen. Whil is the editor of FoxTalk magazine, a multiple-year recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award, book publisher, host of his own FoxPro conference and the first ever recipient of the FoxPro Community Lifetime Achievement Award. Whil asked Paul to write an article detailing his work for FoxTalk, and Paul agreed. Whil also began incorporating a demo of Visual FoxPro running under WINE into his presentations at conferences and user group meetings.

Whil was scheduled to give one such presentation recently to the Bay Area Association of Database Developers (BAADD). Shortly before his presentation, however, he received a phone call from a manager at Microsoft, who informed Whil that the material covered in Paul's FoxTalk article was in violation of the EULA (End-User License Agreement). As Whil was in the middle of dinner, the conversation was short and ended with a request for Microsoft's legal department to document its objection in writing. Understandably reluctant to incur the wrath of Microsoft's seemingly bottomless supply of lawyers, Whil did not demo VFP under WINE that night, but simply explained to the audience the reason why he couldn't.

The link for this article located at LinuxJournal is no longer available.