Just looked at the petition text. You won't get MS interested by blaming them to make a mistake and worse accusations. Would you react to people angry about you?
You'd maybe interest them, if there is a business case in making VFP10, but there isn't.
Those, who can't afford VS, MSSQL and MS Servers can go Linux and do so.
Those that can afford todays MS development tools also do so.
The competition is with open source initiatives, cloud services supporting open source dev tools like JS, PHP, Java, NoSQL databases, those are also competitors for IBM and Oracle. Sun already was merged with Oracle, if you didn't get it.
VFP lives with the support of the community and is driven forward in VFPX. I have to admit I don't know how actively the development there is, but it's more than nothing and if I see people here not even knowing about the features they can get from extensions like foxypreviewer - then asking MS for version 10 is even more ridiculous and short sighted.
430 signers in about a week. I hope for you, this is progressing, but with 60 people per day, even assuming every signer is buying a VFP10 version, it'll take a long time to interest MS. It's not in their roadmap to pick up VFP9 and continue it.
Then there is the problem with the file system and protocol. As hotfixes didn't fixed the problem and you still only get successfully bringing down errors by turning off oplocks, as the recent thread thread184-1745920 about the pubassist software show, you'd need to address that with VFP10 and that makes it an expensive update. Just go for Client/Server and you get away from file protocol problems. You can make use of DBFs, but I would only use them for single user apps and you could also use them in web apps, as then the IIS will be the single user directly working on the DBFs. If using DBFs for multi user at all, then for god's sake on file servers, dan has addressed that very clear.
Anyway, the time for VFP has come for many reasons, not only because MS doesn't support it anymore, because other things are prefered.
Bye, Olaf.