December 27, 2005

Hey Microsoft Visual Studio Team : Free Is Good. Open Source Would Be Better!

Is Microsoft Planning to Make Visual Studio Standard Edition Free?

So, why not offer a version of Visual Studio for free? Well, besides the fact that it would acknowledge that Eclipse is now a contender; there are all those customers that already bought a copy of VS 2005 (either directly or thru the MSDN Universal program). But, Microsoft has never required Studio to be activated (and I don’t think they will start any time soon), which means it has been very easy for someone to install a copy of Studio and not pay for the license. The upside of this is that Microsoft is getting more people to use the product, and (usually) folks that didn’t purchase a copy don’t go looking to Microsoft for support (which keeps down Microsoft’s cost for providing support).

I somehow missed this post from DonXML from a couple of weeks ago. Don has got an excellent point. The one area in which I would expand it would be...

Open up the source.

You want to find out just how good Visual Studio can get while at the same time kicking Eclipse to the curb? Let the Windows/.NET development community have at it. Imagine what would happen if you let somone like Jeff Key have his way at the heart of VS...

Only good things will happen and, like Don suggests, there are plenty of other areas where you can focus your resources and expect professional development shops to pay bigger dollars for the result. The profiler in the Team Edition is a good example. How much more finely tuned could this become or how many other things could you do if you did'nt have to focus a good portion of your limited resources on the core IDE and instead let that best-of-breed talent you have on campus open up their imaginations and let the good things flow.

We all know the money's in the platform anyway, so who cares about exposing the underlying tool source. The only risk you run is... hmmm... guess there wouldn't be any risk given the tools market is no longer really a market any more, now is it. ;)

Think about it. It makes a lot of sense when you do and could really change the momentum that, in all honesty... Eclipse currently owns.

[NOTE: In being a pretty heavy user of Eclipse myself I can tell you right now its a FANTASTIC tool. Well, as long as its the only thing running AND you don't let it sit idle in your toolbar for long enough for the Java VM garbage collector to have stripped away its resources forcing it to rebuild itself in memory[1]. If this happens then its slow as molasses. But thats the Java VM's fault, not the Eclipse tool itself as this is true about any and every Java application or tool I use on a regular basis (OxygenXML and jEdit.)

[UPDATE: BTW... Come up with a good "we spent time listening to our development community and ideas in which they felt could help make VS better than it already is and, based on their feedback, have decided to go this direction." and you'll have your PR folks springing cart wheels and offering you foot rubs and shoulder massages in the spare time they now have thats was being spent on trying to keep the MS image as clean as they possibly can. Furthermore, you would also be able to use just such a move to integrate portions of the Windows platform into this "program", even if it was only the .pdb's. Obviously its only a tiny portion of your overall customer base who give's a rats a$$ whether or not they have access to the source or not, so by opening up the IDE to the development community to hack at, retaining ownership of various necessary pieces by giving access to the pdb's so folks can point out the problems in the code, but not be given access to the code itself... again, foot rubs and shoulder massages. [Extended Note: In regards to the Windows platform, obviously there are pieces from a development perspective that would be helpful to have access to the pdb's for some sort of "Open PDB RAID" database program and other portions that would be exposing WAY TOO MUCH in regards to competitive secrets as well as from a security standpoint. Those pieces are easy to justify retaining complete ownership and any of the OSS advocates that don't understand this... well, I'll stop short of calling them names but from a PR perspective the small percentage of folks making these types of demands can easily be seen as extremists who expect everything for free and don't have a clue how an economy much less a business are run. So I'll leave it at.]

Keep saying that over and over...

foot rubs and shoulder massages.
foot rubs and shoulder massages.
foot rubs and shoulder massages.

See, it sounds a lot better than "You fuckers! How the hell are we supposed to maintain any sort of sanity if you keep [fill in the blank with whatever it is you're being accused of at any given time]!!!"

again > foot rubs and shoulder massages.

- or -

"You fuckers! How the hell are we supposed to maintain any sort of sanity if you keep [fill in the blank with whatever it is you're being accused of at any given time]!!!"

I know which one I'd choose, but then again I have nothing to lose. So I'll stop my jabbering and let you continue forward in your thinking ["foot rubs and shoulder massages." "foot rubs and shoulder massages." "foot rubs and shoulder massages."]

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[1] : Assuming this is whats taking place, the logic in such things is beyond me. Just take a core dump[INSERT: For those purists who take core dump to mean what it used to mean (and technically speaking, really should probably still be this way) I added a link to Wikipedia's entry for a core dump which, after realizing I've never really verified that what I assumed was an OK way to term just a particular applications memory block instead of the entire system's memory block, decided "I'd better check and make sure that using core dump in in this example was an OK choice. It was.] of the memory, cache it on disk, and send it into sleep mode (similar to the way Virtual Server or VMWare will cache a snapshot of the current state of a VM instance... comes back to life A LOT faster than Eclipse does on the same machine (read: same hardware resources so its not a resource difference and instead a difference in philosophy.) Then again, maybe this is what they are doing, but it sure doesn't feel like it when you're sitting there waiting for the IDE to come back to life after its been sitting idol for a while.