takeoff

Jamie Cansdale recently wrote about some legal troubles he has with Microsoft. We were in the middle of an email correspondence on an unrelated topic when he told me about the new chapter in this long saga.

Jamie posted the entire email history and the three (so far) letters received from Microsoft’s legal team. Rather than jump to any conclusions, let’s dig into this a bit.

The Claim

First, let’s examine the claim. In the first letter from OLSWANG, the legal team representing Microsoft, the portion of the EULA for the Visual Studio Express suite of products that Jaime is allegedly in violation of is the following:

…you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways… You may not work around any technical limitations in the software.

The letter continues with…

Your product enables users of Express to access Visual Studio functionality that has been de-activated in Express and to add new features of your own design to the product, thereby circumventing the measures put in place to prevent these scenarios.

What Technical Limitation?

The interesting thing about all this is that nowhere in all the emails is it specific about which “technical limitation” Jaime is supposedly working around. Exactly what functionality has been “de-activated”?

So I decided to take a look around to see what I could find. The best I could find is this feature comparison chart.

In the row with the heading Extensibility,it says this about the Express Products.

Use 3rd party controls and content. No Macros, Add-ins or Packages

So 3rd party controls and content are enabled, but Macros and Add-ins or packages are not enabled in this product.

When I pointed this out to Jaime, he pointed out that this is not true. If the Express editions could not support Add-Ins, how does Microsoft release a Reporting Add-in for Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express or the Popfly for Visual Studio Express Users?

I imagine that Microsoft is probably not bound by their own EULA and would be allowed to work around technical limitations in their own product to create these Add-Ins. But another potential interpretation is that creating these add-ins is possible and that there is no technical limitation in the Express products.

The problem here is how do you define a technical limitation. It’s obvious that the Express product did not remove support for add-ins in the compiled code. In fact, it seems it didn’t remove add-in support at all, it just didn’t provide a convenient manner for registering add-ins. Is an omission the same thing as technical limitation?

Jamie sent me some code samples to demonstrate that he is in fact only using public well documented APIs to get TestDriven.NET to work to show up in the Express menus. He’s not decompiling the code, using any crazy hacks or workarounds. It’s very simple straightforward code.

The only thing he does which might be interpreted as questionable is to write a specific registry setting so that the TestDriven.NET menu options show up within Visual Studio Express.

So it seems that supporting Add-Ins does not require any decompilation. All it requires is adding a specific registry entry**. Does that violate the EULA? Well whether I think so or not doesn’t really matter. I’m not a lawyer and I’m pretty sure Microsoft’s lawyers would have no problem convincing a judge that this is the case.

I would hope that we should have a higher standard for technical limitation than something so obvious as a registry setting. If rooting around the registry can be considered decompilation and violate EULAs, we’ve got issues.

The Kicker

Also, if that is the case, then you have to wonder about this section in Microsoft’s letter to Jamie, which I glossed over until I noticed Leon Bambrick mention it

Thank you for not registering your project extender during installation and turning off your hacks by default. It appears that by setting a registry key your hacks can still be enabled. When do you plan to remove the Visual Studio express hacks, including your addin activator, from your product.

This is interesting on a couple levels.

First, if the lack of a registry entry is sufficient to count as a “technical limitation” and “de-activation” of a feature in Visual Studio Express, why doesn’t that standard also apply to TestDriven.NET? Having removed the registry setting that lets TD.NET work in Express, hasn’t Jamie complied?

Second, take a look at this snippet from TestDriven.NET’s EULA

Except as expressly permitted in this Agreement, Licensee shall not, and shall not permit others to: …

​(ii) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise reduce the Software to source code form;

… (v) use the Software in any manner not expressly authorised by this Agreement.

It seems that by Microsoft’s own logic of what counts as a license violation, Microsoft itself has committed such a violation by reverse engineering TestDriven.NET to enable a feature that was purposefully disabled via a registry hack.

The Heart Of The Matter

All this legal posturing and gamesmanship aside, let’s get to the heart of the matter. So it may well be that Microsoft is in its legal right (I’m no lawyer, so I don’t know for sure, but stick with me here). Hooray for you Microsoft. Being in the right is nice, but knowing when to exercise that right is a true sign of wisdom. Is this the time to exercise that right?

You’ve recently given yourself one black eye in the developer community. Are you prepared to give yourself yet another and continue to erode your reputation?

The justification you give is that products like this that enable disabled features in Visual Studio Express (a dubious claim) will hurt sales of the full featured Visual Studio.NET. Really?! If I were you, I’d worry more about the loss in sales represented by the potential exodus developers leaving due to your heavy handed tactics and missteps.