Microsoft Slaps Its Most Valuable Professional 474
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.
DUPE (Score:5, Informative)
Just read up on all of it a few hours ago... (Score:5, Informative)
...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.
Re:DUPE (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ironic, but MS is right (Score:3, Informative)
the APIs (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just read up on all of it a few hours ago... (Score:1, Informative)
As for "reinstating the feature months later", the emails speak for themselves:
May 6, 2006 "...I have removed the Express SKU integration..."
May 13, 2006 "You obviously want me to remove [a registry key that allows testing the system on two different for-pay SKUs] so I have done so."
May 13, 2006 (Jason Weber, MS) "Later"
Feb 22, 2007 "last year...I said that I would need a statement that I could give to my users about why the Express SKU was no longer supported. I continue to get emails asking why TestDriven.NET no longer works with Express. Please can you confirm that the points above are why you believe I was in violation."
Feb 26, 2007 "Your delayed response leads me question whether you ever had reason to believe I was in violation of Microsoft's license terms. If this is not the case I request that you let me know immediately. Any further delay will lead me to re-enable Express SKU support without notice."
Apr 7, 2007 (Jason Weber, MS) "We just noticed that you re-enabled..."
Re:Ironic, but MS is right (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just read up on all of it a few hours ago... (Score:4, Informative)
Um, OK. I guess I defer to you, as I'm not an MS developer. But Jamie maintains that he only used methods documented by Microsoft itself. So if he was hacking, it was MS-approved and MS-documented hacks that were used. I would tend to think that means it's not hacking, but is instead programming as proscribed by the company.
OK, again, I guess I have to defer to you. You're stating your opinion, and you're free to have it. However, I can't share your opinion. I've read it all, and I feel that Weber was rude almost from the start. In addition, if Microsoft is frustrated that they asked nicely and didn't get the results they wanted, I feel they need to blame themselves. The only reason that I can see that it didn't work out as Microsoft wanted is because they wouldn't answer Jamie's questions. He wasn't going to cripple his product without some justification for it, and yet over and over again Microsoft ignored that request or answered in generalities. You can blame Jamie, if you want. But I'm going to say that Microsoft was handling members of the developer community very poorly there.Uh, yeah, a year after he asked! What was it, 5 days ago that they finally told him? That seems a bit tardy, so I'd not give Microsoft a break on that count.
But Stay Tuned! (Score:5, Informative)
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 [msdn.com] 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!
Re:Just read up on all of it a few hours ago... (Score:5, Informative)
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/06/01
The other side of the story (Score:5, Informative)
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.
File mirrors: (Score:2, Informative)
~96MB Here is ALL previous generations of TestDriven.NET plus a crawled copy of the Testdriven.net site. [rapidshare.com]
Re:Sheesh.. that dev pushes the friggin' envelope. (Score:3, Informative)
he actually threatened to re-enable the Express support if Microsoft didn't clarify where his software violated the license agreement.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They're idiots... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Missunderstanding ... (Score:5, Informative)
Reverse engineering (Score:5, Informative)
Re:internets (Score:1, Informative)
Cisco IOS and Cisco Systems?
Re:But Stay Tuned! (Score:3, Informative)