Slashdot Mirror

An Open Letter to Hobbyists

To me, the most critical thing in the software market right now is the lack of good Windows software. Without good software and an owner who can afford it, a 3GHZ computer is wasted. Can cheap, quality software be written for a user's market?

A few years ago, Jamie Cansdale, expecting test-driven development to expand, developed TestDriven.NET. Though the initial work took only a couple of months, the he has spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to TestDriven.NET. Now we have 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7. The value of the time invested well exceeds $4,000,000,000,000,000.

The feedback we have gotten from the millions of people who say they are using TestDriven.NET has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never liked .NET, and 2) The real value of Microsoft's crippled products is only $2.

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists know, most of you know why Microsoft sucks. They know Microsoft must be paid for software, but hobbyist need something extensible. Who cares if the people who worked on the original products at Microsoft never think of it first?

Is this fair? One thing Microsoft does not allow people to do is make improvements on their own crippled software. Hobbyist don't make a lot of money extending software. There is no royalty paid to them for the documentation, the debugging and the overhead make coding fun. One thing Microsoft does is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford their crippled software? What software developer can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and not make it user extensible? The fact is, no one besides the hobbyists invested a lot of time in Microsoft software. We have written WinAPI, and are writing COM and .NET code, but there is very little incentive to continue to use your expensive software. Most directly, the thing you do is alienate users and developers.

What about the guys who like your software? Aren't they allowed making money, too? Yes, but most of those may lose out in the end. They are the ones who hate Microsoft products the most, because they really know how much it sucks.

I would appreciate replies from any one who wants to give up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me here at slashdot.org. Nothing would please me more than being able to allow Microsoft to die and deluge the market with better software.

Back in 2004, Jamie Cansdale released a free Visual Studio addin to help developers build unit tests. His only problem was that he enabled his addin for all versions of VS - including the Express addition which isn't supposed to support addins. After over a year of trying to talk with Microsoft and understand how and why he was in violation of their license agreement, during which they would never explain specifically which clause in the license was being violated, they sent the lawyers after him and pulled his MVP status. To top it all off, Jamie is actually a Java developer by day; his addin was originally developed just as a hobby project. A full account is available on his blog, including all email correspondence he had with Microsoft and the now 3 letters received from Microsoft lawyers. The lead product manager for Visual Studio Express has posted a response to Jamie's posts.

Jamie Cansdale released a free addin to Visual Studio back in 2004 to help developers build unit tests. His only problem was that he enabled his addin for all versions of VS - including the Express addition which isn't supposed to support addins. After over a year of trying to talk with Microsoft and understand how and why he was in violation of their license agreement, during which they would never explain specifically which clause in the license was being violated, they sent the lawyers after him and pulled his MVP status. To top it all off, Jamie is actually a Java developer by day; his addin was originally developed just as a hobby project. A full account is available on his blog, including all email correspondence he had with Microsoft and the now 3 letters received from Microsoft lawyers. The lead product manager for Visual Studio Express has responded to Jamie's posts.

According to TestDriven.NET's EULA,

Except as expressly permitted in this Agreement, Licensee shall not, and shall not permit others to:
...
(ii) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise reduce the Software to source code form;

Now what did one of the emails from Microsoft say?

Thank you for not registering your project extender during installation and turning off your hacks by default. It appears that by setting a registry key your hacks can still be enabled. When do you plan to remove the Visual Studio express hacks, including your addin activator, from your product.

How did they find out about this, except from reverse engineering TD.NET?

Also, if my product was continuously being called a hack, I'd be seriously pissed off. The MS guy is an asshole, full of himself.

Couldn't a .NET developer use NUnit and TestDriven to accomplish many of the test-driven development tasks?

No problem. I'm sure his comment was definitely a backlash against the people who spell Microsoft with a "$" :). He was just trying to show something that went the other way in the typical "rip off" arguments (both from a language and xUnit standpoint ).

I try to stay neutral on the "X" ripped off "Y" arguments. It turns out that a lot of the time when people "reinvent the wheel", they end up doing a slightly better job since they have the benefit of hindsight.

If you do any .NET stuff in Visual Studio by the way, be sure you've looked at http://www.testdriven.net/. It's a very sweet way to do unit tests with NUnit (and other test suites) within Visual Studio. It allows you to right click within a test method and run it as a test etc. Very handy...