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I am thinking of developing customized software for desktops in Visual FoxPro 9 and want to know what type of licensing is required.

As a developer, would I need to have a Visual FoxPro 9 license and would my users need to have the End User License? What type of licenses would be needed for commercial release? How would the licensing change if I released this as freeware?

Adam Lear
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venkat
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    I don't have a full answer for you, but I found [this page](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/chk1kkwc(v=VS.80).aspx) that describes which FoxPro files are allowed to be redistributed with a FoxPro application and which aren't. – Adam Lear Aug 14 '11 at 03:32
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    Is there a particular reason why you want to go the FoxPro route? There are much more modern platforms available that are not in the final years of relevance that will probably make your end users much happier as well as being much more maintainable in the long run - – Evan Aug 16 '11 at 23:56

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Frankly, I recommend that you don't waste your time starting any new development in VFP:

  • As a developer, you'd need a full license for VFP - a dead product.
  • VFP 9 "will be supported by Microsoft through 2015." (Source: Alan Grivier, Microsoft).
  • VFP is now in maintenance mode and is not going to be enhanced or updated
  • VFP apps can't be ported to 64-bit and are likely to increasingly encounter compatibility issues, for which there will be no fixes.
  • VFP apps most likely won't run in Win8 on ARM-based devices (tablets, phones, etc).

If you're going to start any new development, I strongly encourage you to do so in a modern development language, platform and toolset (e.g. C# in Visual Studio 2010).

Richard Turner
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  • I develop in VFP every day, but I have to sadly agree with the above. VFP was great, the amount of time it took MS to kill it and the number of ideas (hello LINQ) that it contributed to other products bear that out. If you absolutely have to go down the VFP route, I would seriously consider using SQL Server or similar as the data backend. The access and locking mechanisms that is uses for it's native DBF format will also become increasingly flaky over time. – Alan B Aug 17 '11 at 10:37