Pissed Off Again.....
What follows is the contents of an e-mail that I sent to MIcrosoft Watch regarding their misquote of an MS employee. Crap like this really makes me angry. I doubt that it will ever do any good, but maybe you guys can all send in enough "tips" like this that they post a retraction,
My name is Robert McLaws. I am president of my own software company, and a moderator on the official ASP.NET Forums. I have to object to your statement that the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit is a blogger. You are dead wrong, and you took the MS employee you quoted WAY out of context. If you had done your research, you would have found that one of the MS developers responsible for making the ASP.NET Forums, Rob Howard, was building a blogger a LONG time ago, and it may be released as open source sometime in the future.
As to the rest of your article, it is obvious that you are jaded in your outlook to MS. If you had *ANY* inkling about the developer community, you would know that MS treats their developers like gold, and MS employees are CONSTANTLY answering questions on the Forums. And while the Forums are another program built by MS employees, it is NOT an MS product and NOT supported by Microsoft in any way. Everyone lambasts MS about how they won't ever release anything open source, and yet MS-employees have built a stripped-down version of VS.NET, Forums, a system for hosting ASP.NET pages WITHOUT IIS, and tons of free controls.
Your attitude towards MS is decidedly liberal. It's people like you that spread half-truths and misquotes that give MS a negative reputation that it doesn't always deserve.
PS: Think I'm full of crap? This was in a REAL blog, with corroboration to match:
http://dotnetweblogs.com/PMarcucci/archive/02192003.aspx#2663