No, this is not an April Fools' gag come early. Microsoft's venerable database solution FoxPro is approaching the end of its supported lifespan (I posted about this earlier), but many people were worried it would simply disapper completely. As it turns out, MS has decided to open-source the core of FoxPro, although they're no longer working on future versions of it.
One of the reasons that's been cited for FoxPro's incredible customer loyalty is the fact that it is in a number of embedded systems (and that it was a great piece of work for its time, to boot). The author of the linked article is speculating that open-sourcing FoxPro might even create something of a renaissance in its usage -- at least in terms of the xBase language used within it. I'm thinking that's a touch optimistic, but I'm also more than willing to be proven wrong. If nothing else, it might at least pave the way for people to freely migrate away from FoxPro and towards a solution that is open-source by default, like MySQL.
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