http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/no-cost-desktop-software-development-is-dead-on-windows-8/

This cannot possibly be good for our developer community.  Think about it:  Visual Studio has a much more developer-friendly C++ debugger than GDB on Linux – that’s why when I’m writing C++ code, I prefer to do it in Windows.  Certainly it means many of us will be stuck on VS 2010, and Mozilla will have to support code written for before the C++11 standard for quite a while.

It wasn’t that long ago that I implemented timeouts for XMLHttpRequest.  If I’d had to make do with the VS2011 Express compiler… I’d be on Linux.

Pay-to-play sucks when it’s pay-to-make-the-Internet-better.