Open Letter to Jason Weber

I don't mean to be critical but do such "open letters" really serve a purpose, other than stroking said executive's ego like he's some top level dignitary or something who we have to petition through open letter.

Thanks for the idea man. I think I will do a petition. :)

Nobody deserves to be bullied by Microsoft, not even developers using their own tools they made. This is proof positive that third party developers are seen as pawns.

Developers developers developers. Developers developers developers. Developers developers developers! Developers developers developers developers developers developers!!! Developers developers developers developers developers developers, developers developers developers developers developers developers!!! Ah, screw them if they don't fit our business model.

Should be from the MonoDevelop developers to Jamie Cansdale... asking him to publicly leave Microsoft's camp and join theirs.

janitor -

Aye, aye, captain. Excellent observation.

Steve Ballmer may jump around like a rabid monkey (make that 800lb gorilla maybe), but he is right about one thing... it is "Developers, developers, developers". The open source community would probably benefit most if a lot of people right now who are working on developing for Microsoft's platforms could be encouraged to switch... or at least broaden their target to include Linux and/or OSX. Microsoft not playing nice with their developer community is an excellent opportunity for someone else to step in and steal their mindshare away. In my opinion it is a big mistake in the long run for Microsoft to discourage use of their "free" products as they are doing in this case because it makes the barrier of entry to their platform higher. The open source community should not hesitate to take advantage of their mistakes.

Janitor -

Yes. Unfortunately, it's unlikely they would be welcomed, especially if they wanted to work with tools and APIs that were at least somewhat familiar to them.

> Yes. Unfortunately, it's unlikely they would be welcomed, especially if they wanted to work with tools and > APIs that were at least somewhat familiar to them.

That's the reason why I suggested Mono and MonoDevelop in the case of Jamie... its pretty similar to what he is used to API wise and I would suspect that MonoDevelop users would be hungry for the sort of thing he is interested in creating.

Actually -- you're right. That subset of the FOSS community probably would welcome him with open arms.

And, the funny thing is -- he could still market to the same folks he wanted to market to in the first place. He might have to get creative, but he could do it.