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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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