Last night, listening to episode 65 of Hanselminutes, Martin Fowler speculated as to some reasons why there is a perception that Microsoft is starting to lose the "alpha-developer" crowd's interest to things like ruby. He expands on this on his weblog, and one thing he mentioned was the recent patent claims Microsoft has made and how this puts off many alpha-developers, who are mostly pro-open source from Microsoft.

I must not be an alpha-developer, because to be perfectly honest, I haven't really been paying attention to Microsoft's patent claims. Don't they always do this kind of stuff? Isn't this like that episode of <<sitcom name>> where <<character A>> acts like an ass and hurts <<character B>>'s feelings and then they make up 25 minutes into the show and are BFF again? Does anybody really think Microsoft is going to take legal action against some of their best customers? Come on...Microsoft is not SCO. This isn't worth getting worked up about. Not close to home.

What _is_ worth getting worked up about when they do things that directly affect me, like going after Jamie Cansdale, the developer of TestDriven.NET. To keep this in perspective, it sounds like they only want Jamie to remove support for Visual Studio express (?) but still, this is just lame and uncalled for. What's the purpose of this?

To drive Microsoft developers away from Microsoft, you don't need to pick a fight with linux developers - the Microsoft developers won't even notice that. You need to pick a fight with Microsoft developers.