OT: If I were to list what I've done with filePro & vent how I feel about filePro

[Fairlight]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 08:24:11PM -0400, Jose Lerebours via Filepro-list thus spoke:
> I really believe filePro should had embraced LINUX and made it its
> sole OS, drop the rest ... make filePro available and distributed
> with every copy of LINUX (if only a single user development/runtime)
> to lure new blood and enrich the community with new ideas, talent
> and market area.

They did (eventually...) embrace Linux.

That said, what you suggest is absolutely the -worst- way to gain market
share.  That's actually one of the problems filePro had, was being bound
for a long time to dead or dying platforms after a certain period.  SCO,
AIX, etc., were bad things with which to be affiliated.  SCO -definitely-
was frowned upon in Linux circles, to the point that I think they even
dropped the ABI compatibility at some point.  It was seeing no love after a
while.  Pretty sure it's been abandoned.

No matter the product, you don't want to bind yourself tightly to any one
platform, unless that platform offers something no other platforms do.
There's no such creature when facing Linux.  You can do -roughly- the same
things on pretty much any *nix platform.  It's down to hardware support
and ease of compilation, when it comes to *nix platforms.  Linux and *BSD
have those in abundance.  Things like SCO, AIX, HP/UX, and Irix do not.  As
such, what Linux and *BSD are the best out there for open-source software.

However, filePro is -not- open-source, so none of the benefits make it a
sane move to sacrifice -any- market share in favour of either of them,
because the proposed target audience doesn't care.  Spread your influence
far and wide is then the name of the game.

As for free copies with Linux, that would prove horribly ineffective.  You
think -I'm- strict and critical?  I've dealt directly (over the course
of five years) with the former second-in-command of the Linux kernel,
the primary author of ext2, one of the main contributors to GIMP and its
modules, a few people from the early days of Mozilla, and Karl Asha of
Blackdown/Java for Linux fame.  I've also hung out in USENET groups for
popular languages (including the one for Perl, whose denizens I can't
stand, ditto the Perl Monks).  Most of them make me look like a positively
chill person.  They're zealots, most of them.  We'll just glaze over the
fact that for-money commercial software is antithetical to most of the
Linux community's ideals.

After many, many conversations, I know all too well how people in the Linux
community think.  I cannot for the life of me see filePro meeting anything
other than scorn at this late date.  Not in its current state, anyway.

If you decouple the storage engine from the language, actually implement
select(), threading, an API, and the ability to natively bind to -any-
*SQL, implement malloc() engine-wide and dump all the 1970s-style arbitrary
length limits, and improve a few other problem areas, -maybe- it would have
value to a few people as a front-end to some of the SQL engines, from
purely a RAD standpoint.  It honestly would not be much more than a souped
up 'dialog' to most of them.

As it is, there's no audience for it.  People are writing for HTML5, and
GUI UIs in one form or another are now the norm.  Even dBase went GUI.
Have a look at www.dbase.com.

As far as I can see, filePro is probably on life support until its eventual
demise.  It stood still for far too long.  You'd need a decent sized team
to mount a comeback, and even then the odds aren't good, as there are
already established names (like dBase and FileMaker Pro) in the field.

Just not seein' it, man.  The landscape has changed too much, and fP didn't
change with it.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.