There’s been a lot of whinging and amateur-lawyering over the past few days (including a massive dupe on Slashdot), about a controversy surrounding an app called TestDriven.NET. As far as I understand the situation, the primary developer is currently in a whine-fest with some people from Microsoft about licensing for a Visual Studio 2005 Express add-in. Basically, you can’t extend Express without a mad UI hack, and according to Microsoft, said extensions violate Express Edition’s license.
This sort of patent, licensing or “you’re violating the product’s ethos” crap irks me in a different way. At work, I have nearly free reign to develop applications in whatever language I feel like. As long as it suits the business case, I could crank out Java, Python, VB6 – most of the existing stuff I’m updating is a combination of Visual Basic 2005 and VBA automation. I use all of the languages in VS2005, as well as some optional components (managing an SQL Server 2005 installation is somewhat interesting.)
As part of an organization, generally “getting a license” is preferred to snagging some copy of an application off BitTorrent. š At IBM, the software requisition process could take a week or two to get rolling, unless your manager put a “please expedite this” note along with it. With the license, you’d have to renew it after a certain period of time – although I was probably subject to this more than most people, since I’d request six months for each term, and end up needing to extend that three times over the course of my time there. Aside from that, I can recall a certain internally licensed program had to be updated with a license file nearly every two weeks.
My current experiences have been the opposite. Most software is available on the public network share, and it’s an average time of one day between my request for a program and its receipt.
The crux of all this is that if I wanted Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, SQL Server 2005, whatever the newest Exchange Server is, and any other ridiculously expensive application (for an individual, at least) and asked for it tomorrow, I’d likely have it by Friday. So why, instead of using Windows Server 2003, IIS 6.0 with ASP.NET 2.0, and Visual Studio Expression Web Designer, would I pick up a copy of Eclipse 3.2 with the PHP Development Tools extensions and crank away on my latest project with that?
Partially because I know PHP very well and am aware of its idiosyncracies and language features.
Partially because this Microsoft nonsense has left me wondering where the hell I stand using Express editions of their products.
Partially because Eclipse actively encourages UI extensions – in fact, you can’t even really consider Eclipse an IDE first of all, because it’s more of a Java UI framework.
Formal unit testing is not something I’ve done much of in my line of work. I’ve written and executed testcases, and contributed code/XML/documentation to fix deficiencies in said testcases. But when I move into needing formal testing, I don’t want to be beholden to someone’s mad licensing whims.
I’ve said my piece, in any event.