Microsoft threatens its Most Valuable Professional
Who said you could improve our software? — What's the best way to attract a pile of threatening lawyers' letters from Microsoft? Sell pirate copies of Windows? Write a DRM-busting program? — Londoner Jamie Cansdale has just discovered a new approach.
Context & Ripple Effects
The threat to Jamie Cansdale lands squarely inside a spring 2007 stretch where Microsoft's legal posture toward outsiders hardened. Days before, it had signed a five-year technical and IP collaboration with Linux distributor Xandros — the latest in its program of open-source partnerships that Fortune framed as "taking on the free world" and that one blogger characterized as a "water torture" strategy against open source. Mark Pilgrim had already called the pattern outragous in mid-May.
First-order effects
- Cansdale, a London developer who built a program that improves Microsoft's own software while holding Most Valuable Professional status, now faces threatening lawyers' letters rather than recognition — his award standing gives him no shield.
Second-order effects
- The episode puts Microsoft's wider MVP community on notice that independent extensions of its products carry legal risk, even as the same company courts commercial partners like Xandros with IP collaboration agreements — two audiences, opposite treatment.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Microsoft's IP claims function as selective leverage: packaged into partnerships for companies that sign, deployed as legal threats against individual developers who don't — chilling grassroots extension of proprietary platforms.
The trend: Software vendors are converting interoperability and improvement work by outside developers into intellectual-property leverage, with the response calibrated to whether the target is a partner or an individual.