OSNews

Not having the information in front of me, where does it say not being able to test is an intentional limitation? If anything that enhances VE is then considered overcoming a technical limitation, then people will need to stop enhancing it.

Without a clear definition of the technical limitations, that clause in EULA is simply a legal tar baby.

Edited 2007-06-07 17:24

Well I've followed several blogs posts about the issue. I guess the most relevant one is at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/06/01/testdriven-net-an...

As far as I understand, VS Express editions remove any extension functionality from the user (but cannot remove from the Core, since it's very modular like say Eclipse). However TestDriver.Net developer somehow found a way to circumvent the limitations (that requires registry hacks and special user actions in VS Express to inject code). This is the main issue at hand. (Bypassing techinical limitation by hacks).

Nevertheless Microsoft is not happy (they only distribute Express as free as long as there are no plugins. Otherwise their $299 standard edition would be obsolote). Thus for nearly 2 years they've been warning him to remove Express support.

For a long time he compiled, and now for no apparent reason he decided to support Express editions again.

It's roughly like this...

Again. It is only the End User who can violate the EULA and not the developer. At most Jamie Cansdale can lose his license to use VSE but that's all. He is not responsible for End Users plugging in extra functionality.

And again. He is living in UK, not USA. Or put differently. He lives within EU and as such as rights that the EULA attempts to limit, rendering the EULA void and null.

I'm not willing to be rude, but as far as I have seen, the whole thing is more about Microsoft threatening a developer to strip-down his code rather than fixing their own stuff.

The responsibility of breaking or not breaking the EULA is the user's. From what I've seen on the blog entry that sukru has kindly linked, Cansdale is really "working around" a limitation. However, from a programmer's point of view, Microsoft could have fixed the issue (after all, they even know *how* the limitation is circumvented). Nevertheless, it seems they do value their own corporate culture. It's a fortunate thing they have gone through the process typical for lawyer ignorance so often that people have learned to ignore them.

"...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."

There was no technical limitation to work around in the software. By technical limitation, I mean there was no mechanism preventing the plug-in to run in the first place. No technical limitation, no violation.

Microsoft botched it here, not TD.

The VS.NET Express plugin support alone violates the EULA. MS should have removes plugins support from VE if they were serious about this EULA point.

They should have, also, not made VS.NET API available for everyone to see it on MSDN if they were serious about forbidding plugins being developped for VE.