quadra23's Journal: Frans Bouma MVP Responds to the Jamie vs. Microsoft soap

Two prior Slashdot articles, the most recent being on June 5, bring light to the fact that Microsoft has revoked Jamie Cansdale's MVP status due to the fact that his contributions work around "technical limitations" in the Visual Studio Express software. Frans Bouma, another MVP, submits his voice to this situation in several posts. The first being on June 1, which incidentally gained the attention of Dan Fernandez, and the second a follow-up and response to Dan's comment on the first article posted on June 2.

Frans writes:
"As an owner of an ISV, I simply can't ignore what's going on at the moment as it will affect my company as well, and also every other ISV out there: do we want to work in an environment where using a legitimate public API could cause a lawyer threat which will cost you a lot of money? No, I don't want to work in such an environment and I'm sure my fellow software engineers don't want to work in such an environment either."

To anyone who this is a violation of the EULA, I refer you to Frans own questions:
"Oh, and for the people who still think he violated an EULA please provide me answers to this:

• Where is stated you can't extend VS.NET Express?
• Where is stated what the technical limitations are
• If he wrote the code in VS.NET Pro and compiles on the command line, is he still violating the EULA of vs.net express? If you answer YES: how is that possible, he never saw that eula, theoretically!"

As Frans completes his post:
"We're developers, we use the API's and other things to get things done. Perhaps not in the way you intended or want to. However that's totally irrelevant. If you don't want a developer to use a given API method, don't expose that method."