@awasson:With regards to MS and your first statement regarding his "ownership". I just want to make one point and mention one thing. Within Microsoft's corporate culture the concept of "ownership" is very big. Employees "own" things. Be it the feature they are developing for, testing, or writing the spec for, etc. That employee is given control of what they are assigned by their lead or management. This has multiple effects. A) The employee has something they are in charge of, from concept, design, development, etc. Presuming you hire good people this allows them the freedom to do as they see fit, etc. B) The employee gets the credit and warm glow of doing something that turned out positively. C) Unfortunately in a negative context this also swings the other way and is tied very tightly with employees being held accountable for their actions. If things are a total sheep-screw then, there is a designated person who will be called to the carpet to explain themselves and where the blame solely rests. It is often times a BIGGER problem when there is something which isn't owned and it's found out. Because if it suddenly explodes, and there is no person to take ownership or who is to be held accountable. It by default is tagged to the next person up the chain. You can imagine how well *that* will go over.The ownership thing is a big deal at MS. Sometimes an employee can inherit or in some circumstances be assigned an absolute lemon or a sacred white elephant. Such things are the sources of many jokes and many long hours and much anguish time to time by the employee burdened with a weight around their neck. It goes beyond just employees and can encompass teams as well. As team XYZ owns feature set Blah-Blah. Everyone in the chain within the team. up and down, from PM, Lead, Dev, QA, even the tech writers know what they are accountable for delivering and are expected to bring to the table at the end of the day. It's clearly outlined within specs, documents, specs and plans. You know what your accountable for delivering, anything outside that scope is duplicated work done by another team within your group or located off in the hinterlands of the ether. That aside, yeah it seems like a pretty dumb move on that blokes part and it seems like a jerkish thing to do. I just wanted to put the "ownership" comment into a little perspective for what it's worth. Maybe others will find value in this or not. But there you have it. As for whether he does or not, I wouldn't know.
This guy is selling the professional version at $95 a pop. He's into it for financial gain and so is MS (we're talking about the common man - i.e shareholders here). There's no romantic David and Goliath battle going on here. I think MS is totally entitled to take steps to protect its interests. This guy needs to respect the fact that his app is piggy-backing on the result of a far greater effort by hundreds of programmers. He needs to back off.
This topic grows stale I know. I've been thinking about this. Clearly Microsoft was patient with this guy with the caveats that they never specified which part of the code was in violation. I can only believe that the reasons for this might include: they really didn't have any evidence that his code violated the EULA, the knew that his code violated the EULA, or if they specified the code in question the developer would have found a way around that. I believe its the latter. One also has to assume that the developer is honest when he stands by his assertion that he didn't violate the EULA. This has to be argued in a court. Probably because I'm a Mac user, I wouldn't call myself a complete fanboy, as I've seen Apple do some similarly vile stuff, anyway, I have been of the opinion that Microsoft has done what most every corporation has done since Delaware made the only legal requirement of corporations that they turn a profit, focus on the bottom line. Jason, from the emails anyway, seems to be offering Jaime a path that will bring Microsoft more money, and bring Jaime into the fold. I'm being lazy here; but I like what Noam Chomsky had to say, quoted from Wikipedia:A corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level ? there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward.... I'd love to see centralized power eliminated, whether it's the state or the economy, and have it diffused and ultimately under direct control of the participants.
@ homanhI was thinking along the same lines. I'm not sure why you are getting digged down when you have actually thought about both sides of the debate and given it some thought.
Death Indicator -- when companies punish people who offer 1)enhancements 2)security fixes 3)design improvements, they typically die within a few years. It's like Deja Vu all over again. And again and again and again. AOL was given a tremendous amount of free consulting advice in the area of fraud mitigation, anti-hacker and other security measures. But they ignored good advice, even when customers were harmed. As 1994 brought with it the first major virus attacks via email and downloads, AOL did nothing. They often punished the people who offer suggestions, use the suggestions without providing compensation, credit or even thanks. Firing employees who suggest fixes that would prevent massive failures. The rest is history; by 1997, AOL had its domain hi-jacked and offered unlimited dial-up without enough switch ports. Soon, child molesters were discovered moderating kids boards, Klansmen were threatening posters with death for posting things that they didn't like, AOL engineers were selling confidential email and other data to the highest bidder, and more recently they were caught defrauding people who wanted to cancel and the CTO published search information on the 'Net in violation of their own privacy policies. In short, when companies begin to take counterproductive action against loyal, faithful customers and when lawyers begin to take legal action against the "grass roots" customers, they go out of business very shortly thereafter. Why? Brand destruction. When you crush your customers (like Priceline did when they jailed a customer for calling them 50 times about an overcharge), you destroy your brand. This is not a technical or even a legal issue. It is an issue involving common sense, business sense and good will. For a company to complement you one day then sue you the next -- they are telling the world that they are a boat with no rudder, a spinning top running out of energy, a bloated super-rich bully who everybody is laughing at behind their back. I remember interviewing Microsoft's CTO in 2002 or 2003. He had just come from the Las Vegas CES show where he told the world "if Microsoft's customers want security, they are going to have to pay for it..." in a few months, the MS SQL hack almost shut down half the customers and Microsoft itself. The only way to save Microsoft from itself, is to completely boycott them for a year or two. Gates is insane.
awassonJun 6, 2007
He's a Java programmer so yes it's possible he's a Mac user
cadamsJun 6, 2007
@awasson:With regards to MS and your first statement regarding his "ownership". I just want to make one point and mention one thing. Within Microsoft's corporate culture the concept of "ownership" is very big. Employees "own" things. Be it the feature they are developing for, testing, or writing the spec for, etc. That employee is given control of what they are assigned by their lead or management. This has multiple effects. A) The employee has something they are in charge of, from concept, design, development, etc. Presuming you hire good people this allows them the freedom to do as they see fit, etc. B) The employee gets the credit and warm glow of doing something that turned out positively. C) Unfortunately in a negative context this also swings the other way and is tied very tightly with employees being held accountable for their actions. If things are a total sheep-screw then, there is a designated person who will be called to the carpet to explain themselves and where the blame solely rests. It is often times a BIGGER problem when there is something which isn't owned and it's found out. Because if it suddenly explodes, and there is no person to take ownership or who is to be held accountable. It by default is tagged to the next person up the chain. You can imagine how well *that* will go over.The ownership thing is a big deal at MS. Sometimes an employee can inherit or in some circumstances be assigned an absolute lemon or a sacred white elephant. Such things are the sources of many jokes and many long hours and much anguish time to time by the employee burdened with a weight around their neck. It goes beyond just employees and can encompass teams as well. As team XYZ owns feature set Blah-Blah. Everyone in the chain within the team. up and down, from PM, Lead, Dev, QA, even the tech writers know what they are accountable for delivering and are expected to bring to the table at the end of the day. It's clearly outlined within specs, documents, specs and plans. You know what your accountable for delivering, anything outside that scope is duplicated work done by another team within your group or located off in the hinterlands of the ether. That aside, yeah it seems like a pretty dumb move on that blokes part and it seems like a jerkish thing to do. I just wanted to put the "ownership" comment into a little perspective for what it's worth. Maybe others will find value in this or not. But there you have it. As for whether he does or not, I wouldn't know.
latovaJun 6, 2007
It's s**t like this that makes me avoid any microsoft controlled language like a plague.
digistromJun 6, 2007
This guy is selling the professional version at $95 a pop. He's into it for financial gain and so is MS (we're talking about the common man - i.e shareholders here). There's no romantic David and Goliath battle going on here. I think MS is totally entitled to take steps to protect its interests. This guy needs to respect the fact that his app is piggy-backing on the result of a far greater effort by hundreds of programmers. He needs to back off.
hermes369Jun 6, 2007
This topic grows stale I know. I've been thinking about this. Clearly Microsoft was patient with this guy with the caveats that they never specified which part of the code was in violation. I can only believe that the reasons for this might include: they really didn't have any evidence that his code violated the EULA, the knew that his code violated the EULA, or if they specified the code in question the developer would have found a way around that. I believe its the latter. One also has to assume that the developer is honest when he stands by his assertion that he didn't violate the EULA. This has to be argued in a court. Probably because I'm a Mac user, I wouldn't call myself a complete fanboy, as I've seen Apple do some similarly vile stuff, anyway, I have been of the opinion that Microsoft has done what most every corporation has done since Delaware made the only legal requirement of corporations that they turn a profit, focus on the bottom line. Jason, from the emails anyway, seems to be offering Jaime a path that will bring Microsoft more money, and bring Jaime into the fold. I'm being lazy here; but I like what Noam Chomsky had to say, quoted from Wikipedia:A corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level ? there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward.... I'd love to see centralized power eliminated, whether it's the state or the economy, and have it diffused and ultimately under direct control of the participants.
jhaksJun 6, 2007
@ homanhI was thinking along the same lines. I'm not sure why you are getting digged down when you have actually thought about both sides of the debate and given it some thought.
author20Jun 22, 2007
Death Indicator -- when companies punish people who offer 1)enhancements 2)security fixes 3)design improvements, they typically die within a few years. It's like Deja Vu all over again. And again and again and again. AOL was given a tremendous amount of free consulting advice in the area of fraud mitigation, anti-hacker and other security measures. But they ignored good advice, even when customers were harmed. As 1994 brought with it the first major virus attacks via email and downloads, AOL did nothing. They often punished the people who offer suggestions, use the suggestions without providing compensation, credit or even thanks. Firing employees who suggest fixes that would prevent massive failures. The rest is history; by 1997, AOL had its domain hi-jacked and offered unlimited dial-up without enough switch ports. Soon, child molesters were discovered moderating kids boards, Klansmen were threatening posters with death for posting things that they didn't like, AOL engineers were selling confidential email and other data to the highest bidder, and more recently they were caught defrauding people who wanted to cancel and the CTO published search information on the 'Net in violation of their own privacy policies. In short, when companies begin to take counterproductive action against loyal, faithful customers and when lawyers begin to take legal action against the "grass roots" customers, they go out of business very shortly thereafter. Why? Brand destruction. When you crush your customers (like Priceline did when they jailed a customer for calling them 50 times about an overcharge), you destroy your brand. This is not a technical or even a legal issue. It is an issue involving common sense, business sense and good will. For a company to complement you one day then sue you the next -- they are telling the world that they are a boat with no rudder, a spinning top running out of energy, a bloated super-rich bully who everybody is laughing at behind their back. I remember interviewing Microsoft's CTO in 2002 or 2003. He had just come from the Las Vegas CES show where he told the world "if Microsoft's customers want security, they are going to have to pay for it..." in a few months, the MS SQL hack almost shut down half the customers and Microsoft itself. The only way to save Microsoft from itself, is to completely boycott them for a year or two. Gates is insane.