Sometimes I'm surprised to see some reactions of the IT world around some
good things that a big company like Microsoft is doing to satisfy the community
desires.
Slashdot today reports a post
about the release of the new Beta 2 for
Visual Studio .NET 2005 and the new Go Live
License, that essentially permits you to distribute the products of
your work with the new VS2005. Ok, everyone of us knows that Slashdot is
essentially made by anti-Microsoft people, but saying that Microsoft wants to
earn money by doing this and that Microsoft will be responsible to all the
consequence that an application written with a Beta version of a product could
do is quite an exageration.
The possibility to have a Go Live license is essentially an
advantage for a programmer, that can have the official chance to test his
applications also on production environments. Basically, Microsoft is allowing
customers, if they choose to do so, to develop production systems using the
beta software. If you and your customer want this and you
think this is a good choice, sign the license and start with your
application, but you're responsible of all the
impacts.
Microsoft is not saying that YOU HAVE TO develop applications with VS2005 in
production environments, but recommendations are always the same: it's
recommended not to use the betas on productions for many reasons (possible
unstability, undesired effects, changements of platform and features from here
to the official release etc.)
So, if someone on Slashdot says something like "If I program something in
Visual Studio 05, and there is a beta bug in it and my enterprise server app
with 100000 customers fails, can I sue M$?" I respond that you don't
have to sue Microsoft, but say thanks and lots of congratulations to the stupid
programmers that have take this choice! 