{"id":23343,"date":"2008-02-25T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-25T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/02\/25\/when-somebody-gives-you-a-gift-of-code-its-more-often-than-not-a-burden-in-disguise\/"},"modified":"2008-02-25T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-25T10:00:00","slug":"when-somebody-gives-you-a-gift-of-code-its-more-often-than-not-a-burden-in-disguise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20080225-00\/?p=23343","title":{"rendered":"When somebody gives you a gift of code, it's more often than not a burden in disguise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why doesn’t Microsoft bundle third-party programs?<\/a>\n Yes, it has been done<\/a> in the past<\/a>, but the results were hardly a slam dunk success.\n Who ports the software to 64-bit Windows? (Answer: Me, personally. I spent a good chunk of the year 2000 porting millions of lines of code to 64-bit Windows. Just for fun, I did a wc -l<\/code> on a couple of the “gifts” that I ported. Over 100,000 lines of code in one of them, and over 50,000 in another.)\n Who fixes the security holes in the software? (Answer<\/a>: Me and people I work with.)\n Who has to pay all the software taxes<\/a> that the original software vendor failed to address? (Answer: Me and people I work with.)\n Who has to update the program to keep up with new Windows design guidelines? (Answer: Me and people I work with.)\n Who has to make the program localizable? (Answer: Microsoft.)\n Who has to translate the software into 20+ languages? (Answer: Microsoft.)\n Who gets sued if there is a patent violation in the software? (Answer: Microsoft<\/a>.)\n Will people realize that the bundled tools are included merely as a courtesy and that applications should not rely on their continued presence? (Answer: No<\/a>.)\n I know this from personal experience. When somebody gives you a gift of code, it’s more often than not a burden in disguise.\n And that’s not counting the legal and public relations challenges some commenters in the linked article have raised. I mean, heck, Windows Vista simply included some photographs from the user community<\/a> and look at all the anger that generated, both in the comments and elsewhere<\/a>. And those were just photos!<\/p>\n

(Some people might notice that this is the flip side of free code samples<\/a>.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why doesn’t Microsoft bundle third-party programs? Yes, it has been done in the past, but the results were hardly a slam dunk success. Who ports the software to 64-bit Windows? (Answer: Me, personally. I spent a good chunk of the year 2000 porting millions of lines of code to 64-bit Windows. Just for fun, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-23343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Why doesn’t Microsoft bundle third-party programs? Yes, it has been done in the past, but the results were hardly a slam dunk success. Who ports the software to 64-bit Windows? (Answer: Me, personally. I spent a good chunk of the year 2000 porting millions of lines of code to 64-bit Windows. Just for fun, I […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}