Who cares whether Microsoft’s FoxPro can run on Linux? Microsoft seems to care – and to care enough to risk copyright impotence for the sake of keeping Linux incapacitated. If Microsoft is serious about wanting to protect its right to enforce its copyright in FoxPro, it should stop trying to leverage its copyright into control over the rights of others.
On April 17, 2003, The Register published John Leyden’s report that a Microsoft executive had “threatened a software developer to prevent him from demonstrating a Microsoft application running on Linux.” (See “MS legal threat derails FoxPro on Linux demo”). The ammunition for the threat was an end-user license agreement (EULA) attached to Microsoft Visual FoxPro that purported to give Microsoft the right to decide upon which operating system FoxPro may be run.
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