FoxRockX – Time to Put up, or Shut up
Over the years much has been made about the FoxPro Community and how important it is to the life and survival of the product. However, as I have said many times (most recently in my "So, no more Visual FoxPro. Now what?" blog entry from May of 2007), it has often been noticeable that the "Community" has been long on talk and short on reaching for their wallets.
Of course, in the past year Microsoft has announced that VFP will not get another version and that future work, if any, on the product will be limited to critical fixes only. Add to that, the fact that participation at conferences has fallen to the point where from having one major international conference and two or three regional conferences per year in the USA there is now just one regional conference dedicated to FoxPro left – SW Fox had over 150 attendees last year (out of how many thousand FoxPro users in the USA alone - where were the rest of them?) See http://www.swfox.net for details of the 2008 conference...
Subscription to magazines has dropped off to the point that the two major monthly publications dedicated to FoxPro both essentially died on their feet. Participation in the technical on-line forums has dropped significantly over the past 10-12 months.
Into this picture, at this moment in time, steps Rainer Becker.
Who is Rainer Becker?
Rainer Becker is the leader of the German Foxpro user group DFPUG since 1993, publishes the small magazine Foxx Professional, runs an interactive Visual FoxPro forum at forum.dfpug.de, a Visual FoxPro document portal at portal.dfpug.de, a Visual FoxPro eNewsletter at newsletter.dfpug.de, an international online shop at shop.dfpug.com and has organized the German Devcon since 1994. He has been a speaker at various Microsoft events as the Dev Days, Fox Teach and Ce BIT - at Ce BIT fair he was at the VFP demo machine 1993-2005. In his spare time he undertakes consulting work for "Wizards Builders" and for "ISYS GmbH" as well as publishing the Visual FoxPro framework "Visual Extend".
Additionally he has been a Microsoft MVP for his work in promoting and supporting Visual FoxPro in Europe since 1997 and in 2007 was a recipient of the FoxPro Community Lifetime Achievement Award.
What has he done?
First he has undertaken the enormous (and very risky) task of starting a completely new bi-monthly magazine dedicated to Visual FoxPro – which will be available both on-line and in printed version. That is FoxRockX.
Second he has bought up the entire FoxTalk archive and is making it available, on-line to subscribers to the new magazine, at no additional charge!
You can find full details of FoxRockX here: http://www.foxrockx.com/seite.htm
And you can subscribe by going to either:
http://www.hentzenwerke.com (USA/Asia)
http://shopdfpug.com (Europe)
Of course the most important question for many people is, how much will it cost?
On-Line Subscription (including access to the archives) US$ 99.00 ( 75 EUR )
Printed Subscription (includes on-line and archive) US$ 158.00 ( 109 EUR )
(Note if you are an existing FoxTalk subscriber you can upgrade your existing on-line subscription to the printed version by paying only the difference i.e. US$ 59.00 (34 EUR).
Marcia and I have already bought our subscription to the printed version, we have an article in the first issue and plan to continue writing for FoxRockX as long as they will have us.
However, the success of this venture is going to rely totally on the FoxPro community. If the community puts its money where its mouth is, it will succeed and could help bring a new lease on life for the product that we all use and love. If the community refuses to support the initiative then the effort will die, and I am very much afraid that all hope for FoxPro will die along with it.
So it is my opinion that this really is crunch time for the FoxPro community. Whatever you may think about the situation personally, either put up and support this international community-led effort, or shut up!