Jeremy suggests that Martin Fowler has fired a shot across MS's bow with his RubyMicrosoft post. At the same time we hear from Jamie that Microsoft is threatening legal action against TestDriven.NET

I think that Leia can put a lot this into perspective for us:

  The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

I'm not saying that all Microsoft is evil, TK412 was probably a nice guy with a wife and family at home. But if tk412.5 wants to grow up big and strong he needs food and shelter which costs money, and that means working for the empire.

Fowler says that Microsoft has struggled to find a way to co-exist with the open source world. I think the biggest reason for this is fear. Fear that if some of these loyal Microsoft shops learn that there was even one superior technology that was not invented in redmond they might start to question other Microsoft gospel. If that happens enough it could lead to free thinking. And that might mean that instead of trying to solve problems by asking "What partial solution can I buy from Microsoft" they might ask "What is the best tool I can use to accomplish my means" and in my experience the latter question rarely leads to Microsoft.

Fear leads to anger, Anger leads to hate, Hate leads to suffering....

This probably could have been a separate post, but while I've got you here, let's also look at this whole thing with TestDriven.NET .

<%= begin_rant do |r| %>

They say that Jamie violates the Visual Studio Express license because the license does not allow you to extend the product. TBH I hope Jamie fights this and wins. Why? Well let me let you in on a little secret....Visual Studio sucks. There are 2 good things about visual studio.

1. The intellisense support
2. The Debugger

These are the only "features" of VS that I use. (I have used #Develop and eclipse and VS has them both beat here) The rest just hogs memory and slows me down. Want to have a fantastic VS IDE experience? Here's what you need

1. Resharper
2. TestDriven.NET
3. ViEmu
4. AnkhSVN

So for me to do my .NET development I need to purchase VisualStudio for $299.00 and then purchase my other tools. But the only pieces of Visual Studio that I care about are intellisense and debugging which microsoft has said they don't need to charge for. Now if I could extend the express edition by using these addins I would need to give Microsoft less money. Good for me, bad for them. Now I'm not complaining about the cost, on the contrary I think it is a fair price for VisualStudio. My problem is that if that is what they want to charge then they should not be giving away the express editions. I'm sorry I just don't think you get to have your cake and eat it too in this case. I equate them putting "you can not extend this product" into the express license to me putting a bunch of TV's on my lawn and sticking a sign in the yard

You may take any of these TV's that you want, but if you do, even though there are places you could connect a DVR, satelite or cable box you may not plug any of these devices in. In addition to that the volume control only increases the volumne it is not capable of decreasing it and you are forbidden from replacing the knob or purchasing a different remote control that would allow you to decrease the volume setting.

<% end %>

Update: Just wanted to point out that the Jedi are aware of this as well