Microsoft Vs. TestDriven.NET 418
Erebus writes "Jamie Cansdale released a free addin to Visual Studio back in 2004 to help developers build unit tests. His only problem was, he enable his addin for all versions of VS - including the Express addition which isn't suppose to support addins. After over a year of trying to talk with Microsoft and understand how and why he was in violation of their license agreement, during which they would never explain specifically which clause in the license was being violated, they sent the lawyers after him and pulled his MVP status. To top it all off, Jamie is actually a Java developer by day — his addin was originally developed just as a hobby project. A full account is available on his blog, including all email correspondence he had with Microsoft and the now 3 letters received from Microsoft lawyers. The lead product manager for Visual Studio Express has responded to Jamie's posts."
Seems fair to me (Score:2, Informative)
If you don't agree with the license terms of the software/artwork/music then don't use/extend it.
Re:Seems fair to me (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft simply responded with "it violates the licence, but we're not going to tell you where."
More than likely, they screwed up and adhering strictly to the letter of the EULA (and not the spirit of the program) it is not specifically forbidden, thus implicitly allowed.
TestDriven clearly violates the license .. (Score:3, Informative)
It's a classic example of the differences between the Open Source and the closed sourced licensing model. I think it's perfectly clear, they provide a limited version of the product for free, the license forbids extending the functionality of Express. TestDriven extends the functionality, therefore it violates the license:
'You may not work around any technical limitations [asp.net] in the software'
Re:Seems fair to me (Score:5, Informative)
Actually they responded with 5 pages of documents stating exactly the clause [asp.net].
("You may not work around any technical limitations in the software.")
Of course, it's such an incredibly vague sentence one can understand why he didn't think it applied. And I bet they don't want to ever take that one to court, which is whey they had their manager "talk to him on the phone to plead with him".
Microsoft getting screwed by their own EULA
Re:Editors? (Score:3, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174297&thresh
Re:why not? (Score:1, Informative)
umm.. no it's not. it's buggy as hell, just the other day my CTRL button stopped working so I can't block select words in one go.
Add that to the broken intelisense, years to open a project, all the crap it does with source control etc...
and yes you have youself and outstanding IDE.
Re:why not? (Score:3, Informative)
Not sure if you're really making a point by juxtaposing "novice programmer" and "multiple languages", I think you'd wind up just wiping asploded head off the walls if you wrote your forms in VB and your back-end classes in C# and expected a novice to make sense of it all.
Seriously, VS isn't bad (although the Express versions only support one language at a time), but it's hardly the only IDE you can be productive in. Check out a 4GL sometime if you want to see some serious RAD...
Typical Microsoft (Score:1, Informative)
"We may have discussed this at great length, but I was never told what that the "relevant license terms" actually were! I only re-enabled Express support when Microsoft yet again failed to tell me where I was in violation. A straight answer with something I could tell my users would have resolved this."
So yeah, frankly, the whole can't "work around technical limitations" bit of the EULAs ought to be given more press. I think a lot of people violate that term unknowingly, and if it were actually enforced, people would find Microsoft software quite useless.
Re:Absolutely Ridiculous (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If Express isn't designed to be extensible.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:EULA (Score:1, Informative)
Re:As much as I feel for the guy... (Score:3, Informative)
So the guys fight is sort of a principle of the thing, be a pest fight. He's pretty clearly in the wrong. Sorry of thats a bad opinion on the matter.
No, he's absolutely 100% in the right.
Where did you get the insane idea that Microsoft has the right to tell you what kinds of things you can do with your legally purchased property?
It's truly unreal how many people just idiotically swallow bullshit like that and keep regurgitating it.
MS can say he's in the wrong all they like. Not you, not they, and not anybody else in this thread has given a single credible reason as to how they magically got that right just claiming to have it.
That's the elephant in the room you're ignoring.
Re:why not? (Score:4, Informative)
How about we begin with an honest reading of the blog?
Visual Studio Express was a labor of love. It was a small miracle getting Express to be available both for free and for commercial use for customers let alone the engineering work to get it up and running, We made a business decision to not allow 3rd party extensibility in Express. The reason we're able to offer Express for free and even let developers build commercial applications with Express is because we limit 3rd party extensibility of Express, specifically by removing support macros, add-ins, and VSIP packages.
The vast majority of our customer base, now with 14 million downloads, isn't even professional developers, its non-professionals. In fact over 80% of Express registrants don't describe themselves as a "developer". From a total number perspective, beginners are the largest segment of Express customers and they still find Express too complex, it has too many features, and they see development as a means to an end (I just want to create my kids soccer league Web site). Our Express customers haven't been asked for unit testing or extensiblity in much the same way as I didn't ask or even know to ask when I grew up programming BASIC on an Apple IIe.
Re:But is it illegal? (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, there is no such thing as "EU law". There are EU directives which do not (as far as I know) bind a single national court in the EU. The way they work is they require all the countries to implement national laws with the effect of the directive text. If there is no such law, the courts probably won't take the directives and apply them. Enforcement works by the EU Comission suing the country that has not in due time implemented the directive. This, if what you say, might or might not be bad for the developer of the software.
Second, with the scarce information I have about what was done, I gather the author of the software used APIs defined in
Re:But is it illegal? (Score:3, Informative)
The DMCA contains a similar clause [cornell.edu] - see section F. To make a long story short, if you didn't pirate the software, you can reverse-engineer it for the purposes of interoperability. And you can do it for the purposes of creating a competing product, as well. (or at least, it doesn't say you can't.)
Re:english (Score:1, Informative)
-
Erebus
Re:why not? (Score:4, Informative)
And then there's Ruby on Rails which does almost all of *that* for you, leaving very little work for you to do. You can get the entire open source stack in a single archive for Windows, called InstantRails, and there are plugins for Eclipse to integrate in that too.
Visual Studio might seem really good if you only ever read marketing hype. But once you get in the trenches and try real platforms with real development environments, the reality is entirely different.
Re:But is it illegal? (Score:3, Informative)
What was done here was to leverage a feature of the properties panel as an attach vector to worm in functionality. The property panel supports "custom editors". That a feature open to any
TestDriven.NET used this feature to have his own code run in the context of the Visual Studio Express process. When that happens he hijacks the internals of the application to inject his own menus, commands etc. That is clearly circumventing a restriction explicitly imposed on the Express line. It is also violating the copyright on the product b/c you are now changing the product in ways it was not designed to be changed and to which you have not been granted rights.
Re:why not? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Native speakers can write badly too! (Score:3, Informative)
Slight understatement there, methinks.
The standard of written and spoken English amongst native speakers is often significantly poorer than amongst non-native speakers, and for a perfectly good reason : native speakers learn their mother-language mostly from people who have had little if any formal training in correct grammar, spelling and/ or punctuation, while the large majority of formally-taught users of the language learn from and (refer back to) materials produced by skilled professionals. To be blunt, the necessary qualifications for becoming a parent (functioning gonads and a partner) are not the same as those necessary for teaching a language (understanding of grammar, rules of punctuation, memory of spellings, training in pedagogy).
If we had access to several populations of people who couldn't speak a particular language and were to carry out the experiment of introducing a new language to some populations by formal teaching, and to other populations by introducing the language by percolation and self-teaching, then a meaningful comparison of the efficacy of the teaching methods could be carried out. Which might be an interesting experiment, if we didn't have adequate historical testimony of what happens with spoken languages : the development of pidgin languages, and later creole languages.
What might be an interesting variation would be to investigate how the analogy works with programming languages in a non-programming population. The analogy between natural languages and programming languages has often been made, and has often been taken far further than it can stand. But in this context, it could make an interesting and informative experiment. What programming languages to use for comparison is one important variable to control for ; isolating the different experiments is something that would be easily achieved if the experiment were allowed to use prisoners spread across different institutions. A motivational framework should be easy to establish (for example : if your group achieves this months programming task, your group gets a TV-hours upgrade).
All in all, it might be an interesting experiment which could illuminate
- which parts of "programming" as a whole are difficult for people to construct for themselves (pointing to directions for improving tuition),
- what sorts of errors people are more prone to make (and therefore, language design should take into account),
- and possibly how effective different organisational methods are.
Of course, this would require considerable replication to examine the effects of the variables, but the world isn't going to be short of uneducated prisoners for a long, long time. Is it?(I should point out that I'm suffering a wife revising for her English exam at the moment, as a prerequisite to applying for dual citizenship. She was asking me to help her understand the gerund last night, which was acutely embarrassing. And now, I think I should apply the spelling checker before posting! [I forgot to capitalise "English" and flipped a syllable in "condiserable" - which is a level of correction that doesn't, quite, require seppuku.] It's hard NOT to be a grammar Nazi. Particularly on Slashdot, where speed of posting often appears to over-ride all other considerations, including thinking about the subject. Now all I've got to do is figure out how to make this damned machine STAY with en-GB as the default language for a document, instead of re-setting it every tour.)