Slashdot Mirror
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.
Developers, developers... lawsuit.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
even though it's now clear how he violated Microsoft's contract.
I'm sorry - that's not clear to me at all.
I'm not particularly up there with UK contract law however. Perhaps you can explain to me exactly how he violated Microsoft's contract by using the published APIs?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Welp, somebody go grab a copy of his code and mirror it forever on the internets. That'll put an end to that.
Yes, Microsoft obviously doesn't get "community".
This is the same company who released the Zune, which doesn't play playsfornotsure. Media player 11 which doesn't support Zune. IE7 which fixed few real IE bugs but instead added chrome like tabs and phishing filters. Vista which is un-compelling enough to ensure most people will be on XP until developers stop writing software for it. Need I go on? Microsoft isn't evil like many think. They just suck. Totally clueless.
blah blah blah
No one tells me what I can and cannot code on my Linux machine and or software. I have always said
programming on a windows box is like programming with one hand tied behind your back. Nothing but artificial barriers to getting things done. I sure don't miss the days when I had to program on windows.
Got Code?
The fact that the APIs are published is immaterial, really. I know of at least one company's software that has a similar clause in its EULA to the Visual Studio one, and they don't do even the slightest protection of their fully documented APIs. Nevertheless, using them would violate the EULA if I wasn't licensed to do so. That's the contract I entered with that company. If I want to use those APIs, I need to pay them more money for the license to do so. This isn't anything terribly new, and even "good guys" do it now and then to protect a revenue stream (cf. MySQL's multiple licenses).
;)
For those not clear on the situation, the short of it is this. TestDriven.NET is an add-in for Visual Studio. Visual Studio Express has a "technical limitation" that ostensibly prevents the loading of add-ins (removal of the Add-In Manager, I believe). The EULA states that:
"...you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways... You may not work around any technical limitations in the software."
Constructing an add-in that can be loaded by Express is presumably a violation of the EULA for Express, because you're working around the technical limitation (weak though it may be) in the software that blocks the loading of add-ins. Technically speaking, anyone who uses it with Express is also violating the EULA. The best argument, IMO (and IANAL), is going to be that disabling the Add-In Manager isn't really a technical limitation against the loading of add-ins, since they can be loaded programmatically. It's a technical limitation against end-users manually loading add-ins.
The Freelance Wizard
Is it me or do tags like "Dupe" no longer show up?
I think Tags were revamped a while ago, and as a result the fun tags don't show up anymore.
Personally, I don't bother with them any longer. When you could tag something "fud", "yes", "no", "itsatrap", "omgponies", "09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0", etc it was a fun way to comment on a story (even if it is the epitome of groupthink). I thought the tags gave Slashdot users another interesting way to communicate, and to express the general sentiment of a story.
Sorry Taco, but Tags are boring and useless now. Bring back the old ones or do away with these.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Yes and no. I can explain what I read, and why I believe that it will hold up in court. But I don't think you're asking for that. I think you feel that using public APIs should not be prevented or outlawed, and so you object to the entire concept. If I'm wrong about that, you can skip this paragraph and go to the ntext one. But if I'm right, all I can say is that's not an argument I can have with you, as I find it to be a boring one. MS has a contract, they've cited the passage he violates, and they'll sing it out loud in court. Whether we like that or not, it means MS will win in my book. So I don't really care to have a discussion about how ethical MS is, or whether they should be able to restrict a public API. The fact is, they do it, and seem to have a leg to stand on here. But by all means, have that discussion with other Slashdot readers. I'm sure it's one that many would like to have.
So with that disclaimer in place, here is what I read. Near the bottom of the first page of that scan, you'll see that they cite the part of the contract that has been violated. In particular, the contract states that you cannot circumvent the limitations they've put on the low-end product. One of the limitations is no plugins. That's explained elsewhere, but here in the letter from the lawyers we at least see now that they have a clause prohibiting end-runs around the crippled features of the low-end product. This is what Jamie asked for time and time again. No one would cite any clause that he violated. Finally, at last, someone did. Whatever I think about the merits of Microsoft's case, I will continue to think that they're jerks for taking a year to quote the relevant part of the contract.
Elsewhere, in another letter, they explain that they have the legal prohibition in the contract to cover cases exactly like this -- cases where they tried to block it technically, but someone found a loophole. So they use the contract as a way to say, "even if we screw up and left a way to do it technically, you still can't do it contractually." We may or may not think they should be allowed to get away with that, but again, that's where I get bored and drop out of the conversation.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
One of Microsoft's greatest strengths, competitively, has been strong support for third party developers. They would do well to remember that that is a strategic advantage, and should not be squandered lightly.
It's pretty silly to have a free, "watered down" IDE/compiler for their product, and a paid-for Pro version in the first place. They only benefit by making world class development free for everyone. The money that they make on IDE licenses must be pretty marginal to the amount of Windows licenses they sell through strong third-party dev support.
It's even worse to have a pissing match with someone that made one of their products better, and was recognized by Microsoft for doing so.
I hope student developers everywhere take note.
--
$tar -xvf
I just read through all those emails, I have a real hard time feeling sorry for this guy. MS went way out of their way to try to work things out with him. Multiple conference calls, a jillion pages of emails, etc. In the end its pretty simple, he was enabling access to a feature that isnt available in the free version. Hes trying to confuse the issue by claiming that the API is public, which it is for the pay version. Its pretty obvious that he is violating the license. You can harp about how all software should be free and the pay features should be available in the free version I guess. If you want that you should not use MS's products. You should respect the license you agree to, whether it be the GPL or one of MS's EULAs.
I kind of feel bad for this MS manager, he really went out of his way to be nice to this guy who was clearly violating the license. Now people on slashdot are going to say all kinds of nasty stuff about him without actually looking closely at the issue and seeing that he was pretty clearly in the right.
In essence, MS is taking the position that developers can use their APIs however they like - unless MS objects, at which point they get to withdraw the offending code without compensation, unless you count not being sued as compensartion.
Given that this could in principle happen to anyone extending MS software, this ought to be a chilling effect on use of MS APIs without a $10,000 annual partnership license. That sets a pretty high bar to participation. Let's say MS developers fall into four categories:
a. Smart and a partner. These will continue to contribute. They always did. (If you accept that they're not an oxymoron.)
b. Smart and not a partner. These will stop contributing because of the legal risk.
c. Dumb and a partner. These will continue contributing, but their contributions will be worthless.
d. Dumb and not a partner. These poor saps will continue contributing, because they're too stupid to realise they're in the gun.
All I can say is that if you screw with the bull, you get the horns. This developer would have had no problems if he'd been working in free software. That's the real lesson.
L
1. Weber just seriously damaged Microsoft's relationship with the community.
2. Weber was way, way out of line.
3. Weber should be dismissed.
4. This incident has made me doublethink our decision of going to ASP.NET for in-house app development.
5. Yet another reason not to get locked into proprietary software.
You can tell from my sig I work for a commercial enterprise; I'm painfully familiar with how the law can get in the way of things. But this guy has a simple choice if he wants to maintain some form of principle:
First, be open source if you want to be truly principled in all of this. Just walk away - clearly you don't like the way Microsoft operates. Have some sympathy for people in M$ who spent one helluva long time trying to avoid bringing lawyers into the mix, tell them you think their business stinks, and walk away (and get the story out there on the web).
Or, work in the spirit of Microsoft's business model. It's what a decent business person does. It seems that far from being a hobbyist you are in fact selling this tool on your website. If you want to make money out of the Microsoft ecosystem, and they're willing to invest something like a year in explaining their point of view, don't get the lawyers involved. Work with them, respect their intent.
Trying to paint M$ as the bad guys here is wrong - if things are bad, they're bad on both sides. So the license wasn't clear, but M$ spent a lot of time explaining their point of view. But no, this guy Jamie wants to get his lawyer involved. He wants to force a guy running a development team to talk about law, not about the spirit of what they're trying to achieve. That's bullshit. Jamie never discloses the content of the conference calls, he just sticks to his "let's talk legal specifics" - and then bitches when M$ does indeed come at him with lawyers.
He might be making the mistake of many programmers, of course, who think that the law operates like code. Well, just like all code has bugs, so do all legal arrangements. And when you force things to go legal instead of having principles, you might just find that the justice system allows a bug fix to be applied before it comes to a legal conclusion. For example, the courts may find that the intent of the Express edition is clear, and that in the course of a year's worth of dialogue between the two parties any confusion was clearly resolved. They might agree with Microsoft's lawyers that Jamie's own offering of different commercial editions of the TestDriven product indicates a good understanding of Microsoft's commercial model. They might express sympathy for M$'s efforts to get a free version out for hobbyists, and forgive them for not having a 100% airtight technical and legal solution to prevent it from being extended. After all, it seems reasonable to expect that people can act in accordance to the spirit of an arrangement, without needing otherwise pointless effort being spent on perfectly restrictive measures, doesn't it?
The courts may therefore conclude that although Jamie has not committed such a blatant breach of contract that M$ can claim damages, he has violated the clear intent of the Express edition and must therefore restrain from offering TestDriven for Visual Studio Express.
Work to open source principles, work to business principles - both of those I can understand. Work to a principle something like, "it's your fault if I can get *my* lawyer to prove that *your* lawyers didn't put a sufficiently airtight contract in place", and you're just another weasel making the world a worse place for everyone.
<rant>
So you develop components for closed software with proprietary languages on commercial operating systems, and you're surprised when the powers that be want to control what your components do?
If you lock yourself to a vendor, and that vendor acts against your interests, you're screwed. If the vendor acts against its own interests, as is the case here, you may also get screwed. By locking yourself to that vendor, you've locked yourself to their decisions, as misguided as they may be.
It's obvious that control is more valuable to Microsoft than the developers who work with its systems. Tough. Either deal with it, or get out.
</rant>
Apologies for ranting, but although I understand that some people must develop on the MS platform, I simply cannot understand those who choose to voluntarily. The rant is directed at the latter.
*blinking cursor*
Rather than build on that they decided to tweak the system (for understandable reasons) so it started working more as it was originally intended - as a way to tag/classify stories at a high level.
I thought it was always interesting/entertaining - it basically summarised the comments (which is why I read slashdot in the first place) in a way that made it easy to see what the general community feel for a story was. That's more useful to me than keywords in the story, personally.
If you sleep with dogs you will get up with fleas. If he wants to be altruistic, if he wants to share and even make money with what he shares he should look into open source software where this is a part of the design.
If you try this with closed source software of an international quasi-monopolistic mega-corporation you should not be surprised if you get slapped should you do something they do not like or is against their rules.
We are used to much nastier stuff from MS than just threatening or ruining a single little programmer.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Much as we all miss omgponies, what is the rational about banning 'dupe'?
It is hardly a news flash that Slashdot does dupe stories, surly the editors are not so far up the Nile that they don't realise this. Taging dupes would seem to be a good way of dealing with this.
Normally, when that happens, I just follow the link to the original posting.
This time however, that is monopolized by discussions about grammar and the editors lack thereof.
So while this story has been posted twice, there has been no meaningful discussion of an interesting topic. So - do I blame the editors for grammar/dupe problems, or the community for failing to look past some minor annoyances and actually talk about what is going on here?
What's interesting is your fond recollection, that trolltalk was noble and glorious council, that the sublime art of trolling was a magnificent contribution to Slashdot and Internet culture. To everyone else here, the trolls - regardless of education or social standing or media visibility - were a bunch of asshat punks dead set on ruining a good thing for everyone.
You laughed at the PWP hacks. We sighed at the interesting stories that were made unreadable.
You liked all the homosexual rape serials. We learned not to read anything more than a couple of paragraphs long.
You waxed nostalgic about goatse. We cringed and trained ourselves not to click links.
I'm sure that somewhere out there, a couple of guys are kicking back and talking about the time they lit a cat on fine - you know, the good old days. To the rest of the world, they're not a couple of new-millenium James Deans. They're just a couple of sociopathic misfits that don't care what they ruin for their own entertainment. Well, enjoy your happy memories of those halcyon days, but don't be surprised that no one outside your clique has the same take on events.
Slashdot is older and more mature and a little more boring these days. And to be honest, that's just fine.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Maybe rather than the slashcoders filtering tags, they should install user defined filters. That way, if you never wanted to see "haha" listed as a story's tag on the home page, you could filter that tag out. Then, the top 5 tags which are not "haha" would be displayed.
It could even get more sophisticated than that. You could say that you only want to see the tag "haha" if more than 30% of the users who tagged the story included "haha", or something like that.
Then, of course, it should be set up so that users could also filter stories based on tags (or any number of other things). Thus, you could filter out all stories tagged "microsoft", if you so desired, or all stories tagged "slashvertisement". Or perhaps most useful, filter out all stories tagged "dupe"...
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.