Peter Fitzsimmons wrote in a message to Mats Wallin:

 PF> ...and those non-MS compilers suffer at the whim of MS
 PF> licensing;  I do not know about Symantec,  but when has
 PF> Watcom shipped with anything close to the current version of
 PF> MFC?  Never.  This is exactly my point. Something that needs
 PF> to be licensed by the compiler vendor (instead of you,  the
 PF> end developer) is not open.

No one really wants the "current" version of MFC.  The versions
are not necessarily compatible with each other, and the 16-bit and 32-bit
versions of MFC are seriously incompatible.

 PF> Now if MS or Borland supported other compilers themselves, 
 PF> like a third party, that would be much better.

Borland tried to license MFC for their imminent release of BC++ 5.0 for
Windows, but Microsoft made it a condition of the license that Borland drop
OWL.  That was an impossible business step for Borland to make, and may
well have constituted an unfair trade practice by Microsoft, but the end
result is that BC++ 5.0 is compatible with MFC, although MFC does not ship
with it.  In other words, if you get MFC from some other source, then you
can build MFC programs with BC++ 5.0.
 
-- Mike


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