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.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/0 6/01/164254
Fighting over religion is like seeing whose imaginary friend is best.
What are the odds?
Developers, developers... lawsuit.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
...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:
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.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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.
Welp, somebody go grab a copy of his code and mirror it forever on the internets. That'll put an end to that.
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."
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
Could you quote the portions of the terms of service that the programmer violated? The only restriction I was aware of on express was that you weren't allowed to use it for commercial development. TestDriven.NET is free, not a commercially driven product.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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?
If these ( publically documented ) APIs exist in the express products, then isnt tacit permission being given for other developers to use them in products that implement the API? Its like having a door on a building, then saying "you cant go through this" in a eula. If you dont want people to use it, dont implement it in the first place.
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.
We don't need Linux. We need OLPC (One Lawyer Per Coder). :)
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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 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
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 $10,000 annual partnership license. That sets a pretty high bar to participation. Let's say MS developers fall into four categories:
a. Smart and a partner. These will continue to contribute. They always did. (If you accept that they're not an oxymoron.)
b. Smart and not a partner. These will stop contributing because of the legal risk.
c. Dumb and a partner. These will continue contributing, but their contributions will be worthless.
d. Dumb and not a partner. These poor saps will continue contributing, because they're too stupid to realise they're in the gun.
All I can say is that if you screw with the bull, you get the horns. This developer would have had no problems if he'd been working in free software. That's the real lesson.
L
1. Weber just seriously damaged Microsoft's relationship with the community.
2. Weber was way, way out of line.
3. Weber should be dismissed.
4. This incident has made me doublethink our decision of going to ASP.NET for in-house app development.
5. Yet another reason not to get locked into proprietary software.
He waffles back and forth, first cooperating, then not, then cooperating, then not. The Microsoft guy has the patience of the Buddha..! By the end of it, the dev is actually threatening to re-enable the Express support if Microsoft doesn't keep corresponding with him.
Whew.
Yes, I've read the entire exchange. And honestly it looks a lot like the dev is being a dick about it.
Tomorrow is special. It's the deadline M$ 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
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!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
What's better is that when I viewed this story the ad was for Microsoft Visual Studio. Irony makes itself.
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 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:
/ visual-studio-express-and-testdriven-net.aspx
/ testdriven-net-and-express-technical-information.a spx
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
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
You might want to weigh both sides of the story before choosing one side or the other.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
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*
~96MB Here is ALL previous generations of TestDriven.NET plus a crawled copy of the Testdriven.net site.
he actually threatened to re-enable the Express support if Microsoft didn't clarify where his software violated the license agreement.
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
... if he's right or wrong if in the end he's bankrupted by legal fees? Inviting financial ruin just to support cheapskates does not sound like a creditable strategy in the world we live in.
This is a typical case where a small-minded employee works for a big company. The reason why this is so typical of big companies is that they screw up in one of two extremes. Either the employee becomes a complete obstructionist tool to compensate for their lack of self worth, or the company bestows a sense of we're-god-you're-nobody hubris. In either case, the partners get treated like sh*t. Microsoft has entered middle age, and is now burdened with a huge population of small-minded bitches who have no sense of what's actually good for the company and industry.
Copyright licenses are not EULAs. The only thing this person could have possibly broken is a EULA. As such saying he should be allowed to break does not equate with being able to break copyright licenses, unless you believe all laws are equally right. I believe many black people and homosexuals would disagree with you on that point.
TBH, i really dont care that much. I dont use VS or VSEE and am unlikely to in the future.
The thing that kinda bugs me about all of this is that he managed to get the add-on to work in the express edition without "hacking it" in anyway. Now, sure he's in violation of the EULA, but translate that to the OSS world -
"We've implemented a new piece of software we call Mutt Express Edition, with Mutt express your not allowed to attach binary files". Only the mutt keys to attach the files still work so you dont even realise your doing something wrong. One day, a Mutt rep knock's on your door and says "hi, we hear you've been attaching files in emails with Mutt against our license".
Bizare.
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.
To summarize: MS is protecting the poor Express customers from the evils of complexity, because providing an addon that allows unit testing would overwhelm them ("The vast majority of our customer base, now with 14 million downloads, isn't even professional developers, its non-professionals").
Think of the poor customers -- they might download something they normally wouldn't even know it existed.
Neat.
Serves the guy right when he messes with idiots of that caliber.
Copyright is the right to make copies. It has nothing to do with use.
The problem is, the license doesn't forbid extension, it forbids "working around technical limitations" which is so vague as to be completely un-enforcable. VS Express doesn't run on a Mac. If I install parallels, and windows, to run VS on my mac, have I "worked around a technical limitation" I think I have. It didn't work, I changed the parameters (worked around) the problem, and now it works.
Further, as stated many times he used publicly available APIs which are openly documented on MSDN. He didn't hack, he didn't reverse engineer, he simply said "I want to do x (run vs on my mac), lets see if there are any APIs I can use, oh what do you know, here's one called x (parallels), lets try it and see, yup works! sweet!"
Now, if MS wants to implement a "technical limitation" such that you have to cause a buffer overflow to install an add-in to VS Express, then they should do that, and then they would have grounds. As it stands, the license terms are so broad they would prevent any and all functional work arounds, and there are other add-ins which are available for VS Express, so its not a rule that you can't extend it, they are just attacking/singling out this guy, probably because they only want "enterprise" features in their pay for products, and for whatever reason they see unit testing as an enterprise feature, and don't think students or hobbyists should be able to have that functionality
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.
...uses sentences like:
"Do you have a specific ask of Microsoft?"Er, that would be a question or request, you tosser.
And:
I would much prefer that we reached an amicable solution, but I don't feel that we're trending in that direction.Hateful. Just hateful. The guy probably spends most of the day synergising his potentials.
Q. What do you call 100 dead language lawyers at the bottom of the sea?
A. Microsoft UK
That is not true. You can use GPL software as long as you like and not even look at the GPL, much less "agree" to it. The GPL is not a contract. It is a license (i.e. a statement by the copyright holders about what you are and aren't alowed to do with their work, wrt COPYing and MODIFYing, not to USE). The GPL applies even if you don't know it exists.
Contrariwise, the EULA in question is a supplemental contract regulating the USE of something you just got for free which is only called a license because of a lawyerly whim to spread FUD. The EULA applies (maybe) only if you explicitly agree to it.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
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.
He even gave an example to the MS drone in his email correspondence, which is still up on his webserver.
http://www.mutantdesign.co.uk/downloads/ProjectRe
While I agree that it's technically possible, it's using an extension point which was not intended to provide full add-in access. Yes, no secret APIs were abused, no reverse engineering necessary. It violates the spirit of the agreement rather than the letter (which is that technical measures to prevent add-in use should not be circumvented). They removed the add-in manager and loader, which they figured should be enough. Mr Cansdale has effectively written his own add-in loader and used an alternate technical means (otherwise known as "hack") to get it executed. The fact that the "technical measures" used to prevent add-ins from loading were not implemented in a bullet-proof manner does not change the fact that they are present, and that they have been circumvented.
Yes, I think Microsoft are being dumb - being able to run the software you want is the sales driver for any OS, and being able to develop your own is the one sure way of getting exactly the software you want. Artificially restricting the features of your development tools so your IDE team can be a profit centre is of questionable value. Removing the ability of hobbyists to use professional testing features is fostering yet another generation of sloppy programmers who will have to adjust to become professionals.
But Mr Cansdale is in the wrong, IMHO. MS agreed to "play nice" by releasing a slick, functional, professional IDE for free, despite the risks of attracting antitrust attention. Mr Cansdale has responded by thumbing his nose at the spirit of that bargain. If he really wanted a version of his product that runs in a free IDE, he could have written a version for SharpDevelop without treading on the 300-lb gorillas toes. Or he could have just kept his hack to himself (he wrote it because he was using the Express edition to develop TestDriven.NET
By the way - the rumour that you cannot use Express to develop a commercial product is not true. There would be no point in imposing such a condition, simply because the compiler is free (beer) available. You have no means of proving that any
Point 4 in the following :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support
Yes, there are no licensing restrictions for applications built using the Express Editions.
I believe they left out the part where Weber says "I find your lack of faith disturbing."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
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?
He does have a nice chip to cash in. The MVP award. Imagine going before a judge and saying "Yes they're suing me for Testdrive.net, but if it's so illegal why did they give me the MVP award"
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.
"Maybe Microsoft did intend the EULA to cover this case but failed to spell it out clearly enough. That would mean this guy is getting by on a technicality"
All of law is a "technicality". I can't copy a DVD because of the "technicality" of copyright.
I can't drink and drive because of the "technicality" of a blood alcohol level.
If MS (or anyone) intends to hold you to the "technicality" of a EULA, then they'd better pretty damned specific with what it covers. Maybe Microsoft intended that once you agreed to the EULA, you would never program again legally in Java. Well, they'd better spell that out in the EULA, and not say "well, we forgot to slip that in".
Seriously, you're not making even a little sense here. Not one iota.
Have a twelve year old install it on your computer. They can't enter a legal contract.