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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.
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 &
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?
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.
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$tar -xvf
1. Weber just seriously damaged Microsoft's relationship with the community.
2. Weber was way, way out of line.
3. Weber should be dismissed.
4. This incident has made me doublethink our decision of going to ASP.NET for in-house app development.
5. Yet another reason not to get locked into proprietary software.
You can tell from my sig I work for a commercial enterprise; I'm painfully familiar with how the law can get in the way of things. But this guy has a simple choice if he wants to maintain some form of principle:
First, be open source if you want to be truly principled in all of this. Just walk away - clearly you don't like the way Microsoft operates. Have some sympathy for people in M$ 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.