Keeping a careful eye on Microsoft.

Keeping a careful eye on Microsoft.

Announced on the Extensibility forums, a new "tech preview" for the VS2005 SDK has been released. However, this release heralds a new problem: it links to the old, old, very old version of the EULA that explicitly forbids open source along with a myriad of other stupid restrictions - I mean that in the most literal sense. They are pretty odd-ball restrictions, and I'm not sure who was smoking what when they were written. I can't "agree" with the this new-old EULA, so I can't produce any valuable feedback on the tech preview. I don't want to invalidate the Novell Forge project for this.

So now I've got a problem: if this situation isn't rectified and remains in place for the duration of the SDK's lifetime, then that immediately aborts this Boo package (VS2005 SDK's call plugins 'packages'), because I'm not interested in maintaining this chunk of software by myself till the end of time. God forbid something happen to me and then someone has to start over from scratch for no particular reason.

I'm just one guy: I'm not a friggin' army of coders. I need to leverage the ad-hoc nature of open source to deal with the 'long run' issues: maintence, etc.

We'll see how Microsoft handles this.

If it goes badly, I'll have to drop back down to SharpDevelop; basically, mutilating BooBinding and exploiting the text editor to do refactoring stuff (things it was NEVER meant to do).