The case of Jamie Cansdale

Jamie Cansdale is a hacker who created a very useful product for developers on the Microsoft .Net platform. It’s TestDriven.Net, a product that lets you organize and manage unit tests from inside Visual Studio, something much appreciated by programmers who follow agile development methodologies.

Building this product earned him recognition from the community and from Microsoft itself as an MVP (Most Valuable Professional), a distinction created to reward the most valuable professionals using Microsoft development tools.

Among other things, Jamie made his product work even with Visual Studio Express Edition, a version Microsoft distributes for free. The corporation’s executives didn’t like that and asked him to stop distributing it, claiming that the product infringes the license and violates Microsoft’s copyrights. Cansdale has spent almost a year and a half trying to clear things up, and has even published the history of his email negotiations with Microsoft (here and here) to back up his case.

Apparently this free version of Microsoft Visual Studio cannot be extended by its users; at least that’s what you can deduce from the actions Microsoft is taking against Cansdale.

So far, Microsoft has not been able to reasonably explain what the license violations are, or how Jamie Cansdale is violating the copyrights on its products. Still, the corporation’s lawyers have started asking Cansdale to withdraw his product or they will take legal action against him. The deadline is today.

We don’t know what will happen, but attitudes like this are what explain why some people hate Microsoft. It’s true that these actions come from the hostile attitude of one executive at this corporation, but let’s not forget that this kind of executive gets to those positions by following practices that are promoted from the top. I know very pleasant and collaborative people at Microsoft, but these sharks exist too, and they are, by the way, the ones who last the longest inside the corporate machine.