There's been a lot of chatter lately about the so-called Alpha Geek, and his perceived exodus away from .NET.  This strikes home for me, because I'm an Alpha Geek who is madly in love with .NET as a platform.  I see and understand some of the new "in" languages and platforms for Alpha Geeks (particularly Ruby and Ruby on Rails), but really, I'm just not all that interested right at the moment.  Scott Hanselman talks about the beauty of Ruby, but I see just as much poetic beauty in well-written C#.  And when you consider the great things coming out of Microsoft lately, like WPF, WF, WCF, etc., and the great things coming soon (Orcas, Silverlight, Acropolis, LINQ), .NET is such a compelling platform.

But this whole TestDriven.NET thing has got me concerned.  For the unfamiliar, a major contributor in the open source community is getting leaned on hard by Microsoft for a perceived violation of the Visual C# Express EULA.  Basically, he made an add-in that supports all versions of Visual Studio, including the Express SKUs.  And Microsoft's lawyers claim that distributing add-ins for the Express SKUs is a no-no. 

This is already creating a significant chilling effect throughout the community, and is undoubtedly going to push a lot of people away from .NET too.  It's a shame, too, because the development tools teams in Microsoft clearly get who their strongest supporters are.  Look at all the great ways Microsoft has engaged the developer community:  Codeplex, Channel 9, shared source projects like the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit, supporting Silverlight on multiple platforms, and more to come.  They know that when the Alpha Geek feels engaged and empowered, he will evangelize the platform for them.  But the lawyers don't get that;  And to be completely fair, Microsoft's legal department can't be selective about EULA enforcement, or they lose much of their power in cases of genuine EULA violations. 

It sucks for everyone.  It sucks for the people in Microsoft who are watching their good will in the developer community get pissed away by the soulless lawyers, it sucks for open source developers like Rob Conery and Jamie Cansdale, but most of all, it sucks for the Alpha Geek who can do nothing but stand by and watch the train wreck unfold.