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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.
But you know it's true. Read the article. The guy got an MVP and a cease and desist for the same freaking program.
Is making a joke that runs parallel to the truth flamebait? If so, what does that say about that truth?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It appears that they supported him up until they copied his work. After that, he was still free to distribute it as long as they got paid.
This is just MHO. Anyone who hasn't read the emails definitely should both to form their own opinion and to learn how MS operates. (Paraphrased): "What should I tell my customers?" "Just lie to them."
As was pointed out, this is a dupe, though the original posting was a bit more balanced on its accounts. It included a link (http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/05/31 /visual-studio-express-and-testdriven-net.aspx) to the other side of the account. I really have no clue who is in the right here -- the M$ side claims that they asked him very nicely several times to not release his product for Visual Studios Express. I haven't read the policies regarding developing for Express, but I can understand that M$ wishes to keep a product differentiation. It seems to be a big problem internally at M$, as the sales people don't like giving the product away free, while the developers would like a free version to exist. So as a compromise, they release the Express version which has limitations. One of those limitations is that plug-ins can't run for it.
So even if he isn't breaking any policies, maybe he should play nice?
Personally I have a strong feeling that compilers in general should be free. I don't mean to get all Mac-Fanboi here (I come from a Linux background), but that's one thing Apple does very nicely. XCode is a very nice development suite that is entirely free (beer, of course).
The reasons for my belief? Well, when I was growing up I didn't have money to buy expensive (or any, for that matter) compilers. I had no choice but to steal a copy of BC++ 3.1 (and TP 6.0). It's true that the DJGPP compiler did exist, but using it and getting a decent editor at that age was difficult (and I had no interweb connection then). I'd probably still not know how to program if I hadn't stolen the compilers.
Which is to say, I think it's important for the ecosystem to have free compilers. It's good that M$ finally agrees with this. It's stupid that they want to put stupid restrictions on it. But given that, I guess it's their product, and they get to decide. And nowadays it's not like there aren't other systems/compilers out there. If M$ wants to ruin their ecosystem, then let them.
To one of the MSFT managers who's threatening this developer:
Subject: TestDriven.net
Jason,
Regarding your issues with the developer of the unit-testing framework which your product sorely lacks, I would suggest that you run this up the chain to the monkey-boy himself, *immediately*, and see to it that your lawyers send him an apology by the end of business on Monday.
Charging for development tools is a bloody stupid idea in the first place. That's a lesson that Apple learned from you, ironically. When did MSFT forget it? Hassling someone whose product fills a gaping hole in your own offering is not merely stupid, it's arguably a breach of your fiduciary duty to your shareholders.
But hey, you don't have to take my advice. I'm just someone who spent three and a half years working in Apple Worldwide Developer Relations, and is currently the head of engineering for exactly the kind of start-up that's been leaving Microsoft and going to Apple in droves over the last five years.
Oh, and let me add that as an AAPL shareholder, I really hope you *don't* take my advice. Every developer you piss off helps to push up the value of my portfolio.
There has of course, been no reply.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"your a moron and missing the point - they rewarded him for the very work they are now accusing him of breaking his contract to create. this is dispite that fact he only used publiched api's in the first place, so the fact he has broken any agreement is dubious."
that is a blatant misrepresentation, they awarded him for making the product for the licensed visual studio product, all good and proper. He then made the plug in work for the express free edition which is blatantly against MS's product licensing for Visual studio. These are 2 seperate issues. They are not saying his product is wrong or bad or illegal if used within the bounds of the licensing of those products, he is refusing to stay in those bounds.
One of my co workers was trying to get Microsoft licensing to explain how those wonderful bundled packages (those OEM with 5 cals everybody sells) that come with machine tools/hardware would work with our existing Microsoft license (it was standard versus enterprise and unlocked versus cals... and how does a machine with a server and SQL get licensed.. to the OEM or to the company? and who's rules control CALs) and the Microsoft guy would not actually point to a license line and say how it should work. He finally got the guy to email "something" solid as to the minimum licenses we needed to buy to use the software one of Microsoft's resellers sold us and stay legal. They're trained to point to the website.. but the EULA states the website can always change...so they won't actually quote it. great answer!!!
Microsoft is trying to rewrite the license to what they WANT it to say without actually posting that it needed to be changed. If you were to check the version right now, you'd surely find the hole closed. But Microsoft keeps no version control of back versions so you can state on date x I was allowed to do this... they only deal with one right now, in the vein of Orwell and rewriting "history" as needed for the lawyers. Microsoft doesn't like the program, but knows they don't have an actual case. They're arguing the rules, without actually showing the rules.. then arguing the only way he could write the software is to break the rules they won't tell him. They're trying to force him to prove a double negative and he didn't take the bait.
Simple solution: abandon the product. Drop support not just for the Expression Edition, but for all editions of Visual Studio. Develop something equivalently cool and useful for Eclipse, where there are no worries of this happening.
Alternately, remove all the features that Microsoft has requested to be removed. Then add as many features as you can legally add. Then change the license so that your plugin can be used with Express Edition but so that it is a violation of your product's license to use the code with the non-free versions of VS.
In one early version of slashcode, you could create a "hidden sid". I think you created it by just going to the URL, kind of like a wiki, but I am not sure. Then you started posting comments to it.
Trolling in those days was cool and mostly actually funny, and usually more insightful and thoughtful than the normal posts. It was also more vigorously suppressed. There were a lot more immaginative trolls going on. On-topic rewrites of popular songs, Weird Al style, were common. Some guy named Gnarphelgager or something posted long fantasies, a chapter per post, into articles over the course of weeks -- they were pretty good but homosexual rape was involved disturbingly often. You could impersonate famous people, such as Bruce Perens, by selecting a username that looked similar, such as with the period at the end. They started displaying the userid to expose that, and the song parody guys wrote "Will Real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up". Look up the user OGG_THE_CAVEMAN for some quality shit. People actually got angry about the *BSD is dying post. Goatse, ascii goatse, and etc became more popular as trolling started go down hill. This guy named Klerk kept figuring out how to make posts that made the page very wide, so their was a scroll bar at the bottom of your browser, and he could basically kill any thread with a PWP (page widening post).
The trolls were so good you had to browse at -1, otherwise you saw just shit. It was a lot of to filter though. Trolls started posting links to their work in a hidden sid called k223320inchfan, but I found out about it just as a bunch of other loosers did, and they moved to sid=10gramspoppylatex and sid=3dollarcrackho and other places. The sids were mostly ruined by a guy named Scott Lockwood, AKA Vladinator, by incessently posting links to posts of his that weren't trolls, or at least, weren't funny and worth reading like all the other trolls.
Trolling those days was high class. OGG_THE_CAVEMAN was a physics undergrad at Harvard. This chick Peridia was actually Esther Sussman, a real-life Jew, a reporter, who you would occasionally see on TV asking a question at some press conference in DC, and most improbably of all, a female. The trolls I met in real life were an eclect bunch of scattered and smart people, some owned their own companies, several were homeless, OGG like I said was at Harvard, Perida was on TV, I was . . . I'm not telling you who I am. Even Vladinator at least owned his own business. Physically it seemed like a lot of trolls were in Austin and Dallas, Texas or Kansas City, but they were mostly spread all over pretty evenly. Surprisingly, I know of no non-American trolls. There is one dude who is a Mexican immigrant, but he's here now so it doesn't count.
There was (is ?) a Troll High Council the handed out some smack down occasionally. I think before the hidden sid thing, they maintained a secret mailing list to exchange troll links on and co-ordinate efforts. They apointed some guy named George who tried to install BSD to be "King of Trolltalk" to keep order, and that worked for a while.
I'm not sure when it totally became crap. Vladinator was targeted by a committee of sid safety known as "AV3" or "Anti Vlad Triad" but there were actually 4 of them, and he set up his own blog site about guppies or sporks or something and his fan club followed him, and the sid was cool again for a while. I think the breaking point was when Klerk blew his brains out with a shotgun. After getting over the shock of that mind-widening news, I was refered to the blogspot posting of his boyfriend, and had to comprehend that he actually was gay. Then I had to deal with the fact that a lot of these gay shit the trolls were talking about might actually be real, not just homephobic locker room type shit, and that some of these guys spewing out the gay rape fantasies might know way too much about my physical location -- and they have guns. Shotguns were purchased and I started using proxies to communicate.
I am skiping over a lo
He waffles back and forth, first cooperating, then not, then cooperating, then not. The Microsoft guy has the patience of the Buddha..! By the end of it, the dev is actually threatening to re-enable the Express support if Microsoft doesn't keep corresponding with him.
Whew.
Yes, I've read the entire exchange. And honestly it looks a lot like the dev is being a dick about it.
Would be interesting if this restriction of the licence is valid in Europe (or in England especially).
In Germany we have something called "Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen" which limit the stuff a company can write into it's licences, maybe England has something similar.
Wait a few more weeks till the GPL3 is released then open source it and relicense under it. If MS was not mad before that ought to do it.
Got Code?
I rarely comment in threads like this, since I'm not a developer... but I think you're missing the point... in the Jan 23rd 2006 e-mail, Jamie asked MS to tell him where he was in violation, they never did until the lawyer hard copies over a year later (May 25, 2007). The developer (Jamie) seemed, throughout the entire exchange (I did read it) to be willing to ditch the offending offering if they'd just give him a reason why, they never did. The MS manager was never willing to actually respond to the central point of the entire exchange:
What were the violation(s)?
I have no clue what happened in the conference calls, nor do I for the legal decision.. But there is no way that I could consider MS' actions in this case defensible from the e-mails. He asked, they didn't answer.. he put out an olive branch, they responded with the stick... he removed the material, they tried to rub it in and poke him in the eye.
As the other replies state, the clause (in the Express EULA) is: 'may not work around technical limitations of the software'. Microsoft are assuming:
Alternatively, perhaps Microsoft think his original alleged violation of the license (during development) somehow disqualified him from distributing a VS.NET plugin - this would probably require proving the plugin is a derived work as Microsoft would have no authority over its distribution otherwise. I can't see them doing this as I would think it would have serious repercussions for their other customers.
Personally, I think this clause is overly broad and Microsoft's action on it is quite worrying. If they win here, basically all they need to do is claim that something you've written is 'working around a technical limitation' and they can control your product distribution. Let's not forget that the MSTest functionality in the pricey VS 2005 Team Edition is effectively in competition with Jamie's TestDriven.NET.
This sig is false.
It's also my understanding that in Europe, APIs cannot be protected by copyright. There have been cases in Europe of one company suing another over API infringement, but the only ones I can think of are ones where the plaintiff lost.
Third, under British common law, the "reasonable man" defense is valid and does get used.
Having said that, inviting a lawsuit is stupid in the extreme. Particularly when your opponent has vastly more money than you and vastly more political clout than you. (Consider how many in the legal profession use Microsoft products. Now consider the impact of the proverbial "accident". Alternatively, consider the potential for performance bonuses to lawyers who choose the "right" side.) Even if it gets to the House of Lords - a possibility if there's serious money involved - you're dealing from a pack that is entirely comprised of wildcards. Law Lords have far greater independence than the US Supreme Court but also far less legal experience and have a range in IQs that map nicely onto a signed byte. It may even go on to the European Court of Human Rights, which is a whole other random number generator. Just because the main EU courts hate Microsoft's guts doesn't mean the ECHR will. They might do the reverse, precisely because of all the other rulings. You just can't tell.
So, you've a series of three, maybe four, totally random systems making legal decisions based on a type of contract whose existence is uncertain and whose non-existence may in fact create exactly the same offense by a different route, and where the lawyers and judges (and any potential jury) are almost guaranteed to be sufficiently ignorant of nomenclature that the issues will be utterly incomprehensible to any of them.
Legal aid is great for cutting court costs, but it doesn't supply the defendant with magic pixie dust or psychic reprogramming skills.
I'd argue that APIs should be enshrined in International Law as exempt from all IP regulations. An API is not a product - protect the product all you like, but the API is merely how two distinct products communicate and is not intrinsic to either one of them. Otherwise identical products can have any number of interfaces. Happens all the time.
However, and this is the important bit, my argument isn't worth an electron's nosebleed. What those random courts decide is the only thing that matters and those random courts are most likely to be persuaded by the better lawyers - which Microsoft will probably have/buy/steal/pwn. What's more, what those courts decide will determine (to a great extent) what all future courts in the UK will decide. Screwing this up doesn't affect one person, it affects the full sixty million. Backing off is cheap for one person, but losing will cost far too much for far too many. Pick your battles.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
Apart from this, the legal status of EULAs is doubtsome in most of Europe. Some say the EULA is a contract. I ask, where is the signature ? Can I negotiate the contract with my local reseller ? The EULA is probably not valid in many countries. As local lawyers says hyere, as long as it is in english, and not our native language, then it for sure is not legal for individuals. Only companies are supposed to be bound by foreign language contracts (which an EULA might not be considered as).
Check out a comment on my journal from the Slashdot tag programmer -- he goes into some detail on rationale, bugs, etc.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Indeed, this is why people dislike Microsoft's general attitude. It's like they have multiple personalities or something.
On the one hand they want partners, developers..developers..developers and customers. But at the same time they feel the need to remind us how powerful they are and how we musn't cross them.
This attitude seems to have surfaced since Microsoft became obsessed with eliminating pirate copies of Windows. I think the pressure to maintain growth is getting to them.
It's certainly sneaky the way he as gained access to APIs that are already exposed, but unless the EULA that accompanies VS2005 Express says you can't do it, what is his crime? I'm speculating here but I imagine he discovered that his control is initialised with some kind of "site" object representing DevStudio that he can use to navigate to other objects representing menu & toolbar managers and invoke methods to add his own things to them.
Yeah, often under the story the tag would be 'wrong' which used to crack me right up.
I love slashdot group think sometimes. The total/agregate hive mind is way smart.
monk.e.boy
Open source, flash charts
The GPL explicitly activates this behaviour by saying that either the entire license applies, or none of it does. Microsoft's EULAs explicitly deactivate this behaviour by saying that if any clause or term in the license is found to be unlawful, the rest of it still applies. Hence, this is true only for the GPL, and not for this license. Microsoft wanted it this way (since their EULAs grab things that weren't previously theirs).
The clause in question is probably unlawful in the UK and EU and so can be ignored.
Furthermore, sale of a product (or gift of a product that is normally sold) is presumptively considered by the courts to grant a license for the use of that product in any reasonably expected fashion - you don't actually need the EULA to permit you to play the CD or run the software that you just bought. Microsoft and similar companies have to jump through legal hoops, forcing you to click on "I Agree" buttons and break seals that say "By breaking this seal you agree to..." in order to force you to submit to the license. You do not actually need that license.
The same thing does apply to GPLed products - but the GPL permits free use without restriction in the first place, so it doesn't matter. Sale of a product does not grant rights to duplicate or modify-then-redistribute the product (although it does give you the right to redistribute the original copy of the product, or to modify it for your own private use), and that's what you need to accept the GPL for. The Microsoft EULAs don't permit this, so they aren't giving you permission to do anything that you did not already have. (Yes, they are taking things from you and giving you nothing in return; this is one of the main reasons why they are considered legally dubious, and courts tend to ignore them when no otherwise illegal activities have occurred)
but both US and EU copyright laws have explicit exceptions that allow a legal owner of a copy of software to run it
Yes, but you become "a legal owner of a copy of software" only if you agree to the license. Any software you get close to in the US and EU is implicitly (i.e. by default) protected by copyright. You must first acquire rights to use the copyrighted work. To do so, you must agree to the license. That's why GPL and other licenses indeed do work, regardless of any EULA limits that law may or may not impose.
How about a moratorium on MS-oriented slashvertisements here at regular intervals? One day a week or one week a month would do it. Day after day, there are content-free articles posted just to keep MS in the headlines. Let's get back to technology and leave political parties like MS on the sideline.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Basically the API's he's using to release his plugin are covered under the express license I would assume. In other words the license (you know those things we use like GPL and LGPL) which covers the API's expressly forbids using those API's to integrate with Express.
I don't agree with what they are doing but it seems like they have a legal leg to stand on. The irony here is that if he had "hacked" it instead of using the MS api's he would probably be protected by reverse engineering laws.
Personally if I was him I would just withdraw my project all totally, there is nothing to gain from being sued by Microsoft aside from some personal ego
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Actually I think the dupe tag was far too overused.
Since an awful lot of slashdot users are too lazy to actually read the full article they would tag something as dupe just because it was on the same topic that was previously mentioned, even though the article that was linked to would often add something unique that had previously been unknown in the slashdot debate.
I this case the previous article was regarding the guys blog and this was regarding the registers coverage of the same article. Since I have not read this guys blog in its entirety I am unable to say whether the register article adds anything new.
I was however that the register article was posted here as it gave me a way of finding out the synopsis of the story without having trawl through what would have been a one sided account. People being threatened with legal action are rarely impartial about the people trying to drag them through the courts.
I think a better solution than removing the dupe tage though would have been to prevent people who do not click on any links contained in the text from posting a comment or any feedback. Afterall, what can you possible add to the discussion if you are too lazy to RTFA.
I know there are exceptions to this such as if you hover over the link and see if it is the same link you have previously read but how many people apart from me do this?
I dont read
was the incredible number of stories that became tagged with "haha." Maybe I'm not in the majority with this opinion, but it came off as childish, and it annoyed me that any time a story about something marginally bad happening to any of the slashdot appointed evils ran, I could always count on it being tagged "haha." It just put images in my mind of a bunch of 12 years going "LOL FAGS," and I hated that, of course, because to some degree I come here for the maturity of the discussion. Maybe I totally misinterpreted the sense of that haha, but either way, that is one tag I'm not sad to see go.
Cheers.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
That's an interesting thought. I understand the argument that you are purchasing a license to use the software, but when said software is distributed via a tangible medium there is also a sale of a physical object occurring. Has it ever been tested in court that when you purchase a product in this manner that no ownership has been created? If I were to steal the physical copy from you would you have no case since you didn't really buy anything? Obviously that isn't the case, but it frames the legal question a bit more clearly. You have received something. It is just as tangible as a book or music CD. License or no, you own that. Legally. Further at the point of sale, no contract has been created. You have agreed to nothing.
If there is an exception stating that you can run what you own then regardless of license. Obviously IANAL and have not looked at the "explicit exceptions" to copyright that was mentioned, but I think its erroneous to say that I am not a legal owner of a copy of the software if I disagree with the license. Perhaps the courts will rule that way in the end, but as of now I think that question is unresolved.