Installable File Systems

My rant for  today:

    Can anyone give a good reason why Microsoft's Installable File System Kit (IFS) costs $1000? 

    My understanding was that Microsoft was supposed to be opening APIs, not closing them with a price barrier.  If anything, IFS should be part of an MSDN subscription, just as the DDK is.

    The IFS FAQ does try to address my question (and apparently, it's a question that is asked fairly often).  However, the explanation sounds almost churlish:

Q: Why doesn't the IFS Kit get included with MSDN Universal?

A: There are a variety of reasons why the IFS Kit is not included with MSDN. The license agreement for the kit is different than the normal MSDN license for one. Though we are considering it for future releases.

Since when does license differences preclude including a product with MSDN?  The Office 2003 and SQL Server 2000 licences are wildly different, and yet both products seem to co-exist the MSDN space quite nicely.  And, what's so special about IFS that it needs a different licence from the DDK?

If you'd like to mess a bit with IFS without chunking out a cool grand, check out Bo Branten's Ntifs.h.  It's a GPL'd version of what you need to build an Installable File System.  He advises not using this in production environments, but it's a good way of getting you feet wet with IFS.