Re:Hard to defend (Score 2, Informative)

Given that, they should be happy that their ideas have been adopted and given much wider exposure via Visual Studio. Perhaps their motives are not so pure and they now see their chance at big bucks from the big, rich nasty corporation?

Michael Kölling found out that microsoft had copied much of BlueJ's core functionality back in May 2005 (http://www.bluej.org/vs/vs-bj.html) and at the time he had this to say:
"Do I care? I don't care that they copied BlueJ - good on them, and good luck to them. But I care about attribution."

Microsoft allowing people free downloads of Visual Studio Express is all well and good (aside from the obvious arguments about locking people into their platform and software) except that it doesn't seem that these features taken from BlueJ don't seem to be part of the Express feature set:
"One final remark: this page seems to suggest that this new feature will be omitted from Visual Studio Express - exactly the VS version that is aimed at students!"
So their ideas only gain wider (unattributed) exposure through the commercial version of VS (I don't use VS, so can't confirm this personally).
Their motives seem to me to be about survival and not "big bucks from the big, rich nasty corporation".