Last week I was on a holiday with my family in Normandy in France.
Some of the touristic highlights that we visited were of course the D-Day beaches Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold and Sword where the allied forces started the liberation of the Northern part of Europ on June 6, 1944.
Near those beaches we also visited the war cemetaries where thousands of solders from the US, Britain, Canada and other countries were buried. This was very impressive as you can imagine.
The thought about these (mostly) young men that have given their lives to help liberate Europe, makes you feel very grateful and sad at the same time. You know that each person has left behind parents, or wife and children who have had to miss their loved sons or husbands and fathers.
At the same time the number of casualties was of course much smaller than the number of people that were killed by the occupiers. Compared to these numbers, the number of deceased allied soldiers was relatively low.
This reminded me of the famous quote from Spock in Vulcan "The needs of the wany outweigh the needs of the few, or the one".
I am sure that these soldiers and their families did not have something like that in mind, but I am glad that the allied leaders have chosen to liberate Europe, even when they could know that this would mean serious losses of allied lives.
And this quote from Spock also nicely describes why many people, including we, have chosen to publish their software under an Open Source license: The needs of the many people working with the product outweigh the needs of the few people developing it or owning it.
People should not be dependent on the quirks of an individual software vendor and should be able to work with a product or continue to improve a product after the original manufactorer has retired the product.
Finally, something completely different
Next week we will be attending the Microsoft Visual Studio Partner Summit in Redmond. We have been given the opportunity to demonstrate our product to other Visual Studio Partners and to Microsoft Staff. We hope to raise some interest there and to speak with people from the FoxPro community inside Microsoft. Maybe we can even get some help to get started on the FoxPro dialect?
We will also speak with some Microsoft Visual Studio specialists to help solve a few "challenges" that we have with our Visual Studio Integration.
In the mean time we have also worked on some of the remaining issues to support the Bring Your Own Runtime concept.
You can expect a new release in the first week of August.
Robert
my small company currently depends on Visual Objects currently, and starts to depend also from X# because the development focus is shifting more and more, and from my software several customer companies are depending.
Therefore the use of an open source development tool is very important, but it should not be forgotten that "open source" does not necessarily means "free" or better "free of charge", because work need to be paid in some manner. Therefore I would encourage anyone interested in X# to contribute money and/or work time to the project, otherwise also an open source project cannot be succeed.
Wolfgang