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

[Jose Lerebours]

Mark,

You make, very elegantly I most say, my point ... in its current state, 
I agree, it has no chance (lets see what next release packs within ...) 
but I truly believe that if they had focused on one OS and at its 
infancy (the OS') they could have captured a sizable market worldwide.

I am not suggesting they do this now but rather that they should had 
done it years ago when RedHat was taking free OS and making $$$ because, 
lots of businesses and enthusiastic techies were willing (and still are) 
to pay for stable apps and a "go to" team.

All that said, some in this list have predicted the "death" of filePro 
and sucker keeps punching his way to the next round (or year).



On 03/26/2018 09:22 PM, Fairlight via Filepro-list wrote:
> 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->

-- 
Jose D. Lerebours
954-559-7186
https://www.cargosaas.com
http://www.ezbookeep.com
http://www.ezdaemon.com
http://www.fp2php.com