Microsoft vs. Jamie Cansdale

2007-05-31 james 4 comments

I honestly don’t know who is right or wrong from a legal perspective (Damn it, Jim, I’m a developer not a lawyer!), but does anyone find it a bit strange that Microsoft is suing Jamie Cansdale over TestDriven.NET? Jamie’s legal troubles stem from TestDriven.NET supporting Visual Studio Express. Microsoft apparently feels that add-ins to VS Express are verboten.* Read Jamie’s posts here and here and make your own decision. Is Microsoft really worried that VS Express and TestDriven.NET are such a killer combo that it’s going to impact sales of VSTS Developer Edition? My guess is that allowing one add-in opens the door for other vendors to create add-ins. So it’s more about establishing precedent than Microsoft feeling that unit testing and code coverage integration are not appropriate for hobbyist developers.

Regardless of Jamie’s legal troubles, TestDriven.NET is an excellent add-in. In an effort to support software that makes my development life easier, I’ve bought a copy of TestDriven.NET. Thanks for all your hard work, Jamie.

* If add-ins aren’t allowed in VS Express, does Microsoft have to sue themselves over Popfly Explorer? (I can’t take credit for this as it was pointed out by Stephen Oakman, a commenter on Jamie’s blog.)

UPDATE: Bil makes a good point that XNA Game Studio Express is another Microsoft-made extension to Visual Studio Express. Personally I don’t buy the “Microsoft is giving Express away for free and therefore should be able to extend it if they want” argument. If that was a valid argument, I would recommend to Microsoft that they give away Windows for free. Then Microsoft could tell various third-party software companies (anti-virus, Adobe, Sun, etc.) that their products violate the EULA for the free Windows operating system, but release competing products. Well, they wouldn’t actually be competing because there would be nothing to compete with. Note that this would be a completely different story if a product enabled unavailable premium features, such as Vista Ultimate Extras on a non-Ultimate editions. We’re talking about extending a piece of software to which you have a license.

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#1 | Written by Mike about 17 years ago. Reply

"deveoloper not a doctor" thats too funny.

Read the whole email chain Jason posted, MS is being more than fair, and patient. IMO

MS can extent their ‘free’ product anyway they like.
#2 | Written by James Kovacs about 17 years ago. Reply

I did read the whole email chain. Assuming that Jamie is being completely forthcoming (and only Jamie, Jason Weber, and possibly Grant Drake know for sure), I find it strange that he was asked to disable functionality because it violated license terms, but was not told for a year which exact terms he was violating. If JetBrains came to me today and demanded that I stop distributing VstsUnit Plug-in for ReSharper because it violated the ReSharper license agreement, don’t you think I would want to know exactly which terms I was violating? I think that Jamie took some inflammatory actions (re-enabling Express support) that could have been handled better. Still I don’t envy his position of facing down the Microsoft legal juggernaut as a lone individual, whether he is right or wrong in his interpretation of the Express EULA.

As for Microsoft being able to extend their free product any way they like, isn’t that what got them into hot water with the DoJ and European Union? The fact that there is a (real or perceived) uneven playing field between Microsoft and third-party developers in which APIs are available for use?
#3 | Written by Martin Scheffer about 17 years ago. Reply

If they don’t want Express to be extensible, then WHY IS IT ?

this makes no sense at all, if they want to be the only ones to extend it they should use undocumented API’s
#4 | Written by Aridane about 13 years ago. Reply

You have NUnit in express using the extension manager, so you can have *FREE* TDD addins in VS Express.
But you can’t *SELL* an addin for the free express versions. Microsoft is not trying to protect the professional versions of visual studio but their vs professional customers. There is a big market around visual studio extensibility.
Popfly is also free.

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