Microsoft Slaps Its Most Valuable Professional

Violent Offender writes with a touching story in The Register about Microsoft's awarding of its Most Valuable Professional credential to a British hobbyist, Jamie Cansdale, then turning around and threatening him with a lawsuit for the very software that won him the award. The article links to the amazing correspondence from Microsoft on Cansdale's site.

Comments

DUPE

[Ekhymosis]

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/0 6/01/164254

Re:DUPE

[Anonymous Coward]

They no longer show up. The editors claim "dupe" is special and notifies them rather than showing up... but, uh, apparently they have to be paying attention.

Just read up on all of it a few hours ago...

[Anthony Boyd]

...apparently Jamie has until 4 PM tomorrow (the 6th) to respond to the lawyers or remove the offending application.

If you read through ALL the correspondence (a boring, lengthy exercise), you'll find out a few interesting facts:

• Weber, the guy at Microsoft stirring up trouble, was a jerk on 3 counts
  • He assumed that Jamie was hacking the low-end free version of Microsoft's products, when in fact Jamie used APIs published by Microsoft
  • Weber was rude
  • Weber wouldn't state what part of which license Jamie had violated. This is the boring part of the correspondence, because Jamie asks over and over again, and keeps getting back generalities such as "the relevant parts apply." That is crazy making, and I would not at all be as polite as Jamie has been.
• Now that lawyers are involved, it's pretty clear how Jamie violated their terms.
• Jamie is looking for a way to "stand up to the bullies" so to speak, even though it's now clear how he violated Microsoft's contract. That's not to say he's BAD -- he's quite great, actually, with a great product, too -- but now that MS has said "here is what you violated, please correct it" he should correct it. With no tricks, no reinstating the feature months later (which he has done once already).

The end result is that Jamie wants to fight it, but if he does, he's gonna lose in court. However, he is very very right in one aspect -- Microsoft deserves a black eye over this, and I don't blame Jamie for wanting to punch them in the face. I don't think Microsoft/Weber was particularly evil, but they were slightly rude and rather stupid. They would not answer Jamie's requests, over and over again. If they had just answered him plainly and clearly, this would have been solved a year ago.

Re:Just read up on all of it a few hours ago...

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Except that "public" APIs aren't being used in this case.

http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/06/01/ testdriven-net-and-express-technical-information.a spx

Friday, June 01, 2007 3:20 PM by danielfe
TestDriven.NET and Express - Technical Information
I quickly wanted to respond to questions or misconceptions raised in the comments of my previous blog post.

A common question or misconception in the comments is saying that if didn't want extensibility we should have provided technical limitations to prevent extensibility (see comments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18).

Express Extension Workarounds
To respond, Visual Studio Express extensibility is limited in a number of ways. One way it is limited is that it does not permit extensibility through Macros, Add-Ins, or Packages. It attempts to reserve these limitations by technical means. Some examples of these technical limitations are that there is no Macros IDE, there is no Add-In manager, and registered Add-In's and Packages are not loaded at startup. The only way to even extend Express is to work around these in-built technical limitations and that is prohibited by the License.

For a high-level overview on how TestDriven.NET works around technical limitations, here's a response from our development team:

**
The TestDriven.NET product is implemented as a Visual Studio Add-In. In the Visual Studio Standard, Professional, and Team System SKUs, TestDriven.NET is installed as an Add-In and gets loaded into the IDE through the Add-In Manager. In the Visual Studio Express SKUs, because we disabled extensibility (macros, Add-ins, and VS Packages), the Add-In Manager is removed and therefore Add-Ins are not detected or loaded. Jamie has created additional components specifically for the Express SKUs to work around this technical limitation. He takes advantage of an extensibility point that allows user controls (such as a button class) to customize entries in the Properties window. When his property extender gets called, he executes code that finds, loads and injects the TestDriven.Net assembly into the Express SKU's running process, thus replacing the functionality of the removed Add-In Manager. This explains why he instructs Visual Studio Express users to open the Properties window in order to enable TestDriven.NET. Once his code is injected into the Express SKU's running process it can add menu items, enable features that were disabled, and in general take over that instance of Express. These special loading mechanisms that Jamie has built exclusively for the Express SKUs are unauthorized workarounds to the SKUs' technical limitations.
**

For an analogy, this would be comparable to someone working around the technical limitations in the personal version of TestDriven.NET to unlock features in the professional or enterprise versions for free.

What complicates this even further is that this isn't a developer doing this for his or her personal use or experimenting with our product, this is a business trying to sell a product. We tried for close to two years to get Jamie to stop releasing the Express version of TestDriven.NET without success.

I hope this helps clarify some of the questions or misconceptions surrounding this issue.

Filed under: Visual Studio Express
Comment Notification

But Stay Tuned!

[twitter]

Tomorrow is special. It's the deadline M$ gave him to remove Express support.

Thanks for pointing to the old article. The Dan Fernande's letter is priceless entertainment parodied in the following Power Point Slide:

Please Don't Help Express Users
by Dan Fernandez

• We've done so much for you, even calling you on the phone - twice in two years.
• Most people prefer our no cost version, they are not Professionals and some admit it.
• Non Professional users are easily confused, please don't make their life easier with confusing choice.
• Back when I programmed in BASIC, I would not have wanted anything else.
• I know Professionals who can't code.
• Helping people violates our "ethos"
• We are going to pick up our toys and go home now and it's all YOUR FAULT.

Why do they try? There's no way for them to win this.

Let's see what happens next! Will they stop issuing Express, remotely disable it and then sue Jamie? Do they leave him alone and let it keep working with ... the appropriate apology? Ha!

The other side of the story

[I'm Don Giovanni]

I know that most slashdotters don't even want to hear Microsoft's side of the story, but for the few that might, read these two blog entries by Dan Fernandez:

This gives MS's side of the story, including the two-year history of this issue:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/05/31/ visual-studio-express-and-testdriven-net.aspx

This follow-up blog entry gives technical details on the hacking required to get TestDriven.NET to run in VS Express:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/06/01/ testdriven-net-and-express-technical-information.a spx

You might want to weigh both sides of the story before choosing one side or the other.

Re:Missunderstanding ...

[RealSurreal]

Copyright is the right to make copies. It has nothing to do with use.

Reverse engineering

[Savage-Rabbit]

It is important to note, that in the EU, you have a right to make your products compatible, even if it takes reverse engineering. This right you can not in any way give up in any contract (according to EU law). So if he makes the product in the EU, then he is bound by EU law and can publish the product and even sell it, all he want. This is a fairly complicated issue. According to a legal lecture on the subject which I attended recently it seems that in much of Europe reverse engineering is permitted under extraordinary circumstances which surprised me since I always thought (or assumed to be honest) that reverse engineering was completely forbidden by law. These laws vary by country and the laws permitting this aren't unrestricted in the degree of reverse engineering they allow although a lot of people seem to assume they are. If, for example, you want to create a mail client capable of communicating with a Microsoft Exchange server and Microsoft is (hypothetically) flat-out refusing to furnish you with technological documentation at all (I have never written an Exchange enabled mail client so I don't know how difficult they make the process) there are countries whose laws will give you a case for reverse engineering the protocols involved etc. other countries are more conservative in this. However, even if you think you have a legal case, if Microsoft lawyers up locally and sues you in your home country, you still have to show that they were being totally unreasonable towards you in your attempts to obtain documentation in order for your claim of forced reverse engineering to stand up in court. I don't claim to be a legal weasel, and there is probably a lot more to be said about this issue than I have done here, but I think we can conclude that reverse engineering the products of a major software giant is risky business that can become very expensive even if you have the law on your side.