Longhorn needs a "Go Live License"

The “Go Live License“ for ASP.NET was a great thing. Here's a post from an old blog by Scott Guthrie as well as a mention in an interview with Eric Rudder.

While Scott talks about how the “Go Live License“ showed how much confidence Microsoft had in the technology, what I mostly recall was the relief at being able to use beta code in a real system without having to worry about the Microsoft “license police“. Actually, I don't even know if they have a “license police“ <g>, but since I was working on the .NET Framework team at that time, the last thing I wanted was to get “busted” for using beta code publicly.

Thinking much further back, I also recall the excitement around the buildup to the Windows 95 launch (I actually wrote a peripheral piece of that product as well). Of course, back then much of communication took place on a private CompuServe forum and it's probably impossible to build an online community today with such a high “signal to noise“ ratio. Still, there were a number of tools and utilities that the inner circle developed that could only be distributed amongst themselves.

So...Microsoft is hoping that there are some new “killer apps“ that Longhorn technology is going to enable. Except that it's not going to ship for a few years. So, why would developers spend time now working on something that they couldn't generate any revenue from - or start building a business around - until that time? Well, what if they could start distributing early versions of their products this coming summer when the first major beta happens? My feeling is that, if Microsoft wants to hear about cool new applications next year, they need to articulate an equivalent “Go Live License“ right now.