Nick Sieger writes about Microsft, Competition and the Right Fork and says that they should make their tools free - in particular referencing "the goodies being dangled in front of developers". A good argument too - it would be even better if it weren't the case these things are free - with the one caveat that you need to pay for the operating system they run on.
IIS? In the box with XP and Windows server - and there are alternatives to IIS. SQL Server? The big hefty ones ain't free but currently MSDE is (mostly) and soon the far less restrictive SQL Server 2005 Express will be. Devtools? Now this is where is gets interesting - the framework is free, the libraries (all the good stuff referenced) are free, the compilers are free the tools that go with the compilers are free. What isn't free is the Visual Studio IDE but equally it isn't necessary to the production of software - and there are open source IDEs for .NET
So two different questions then, should Visual Studio be free? It would be nice but I can't make a good argument (even allowing that there's all this very nice stuff in Team System that's out of our budget). Should Microsofts operating systems be free? Well no, that's the business model isn't it - make the platforms attractive by giving (oh yes they do) the developers all the tools they need - if not quite all the tools they want.
Oh well, that was possibly foolish but here we go (reaches for save button)
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