building on windows very very odd

[horkana]

>From the Build.txt of Abiword 0.7.11

> You also need Visual C++ 5.0.  Obviously, we don't use the IDE at all,
> but we do use the compiler, headers, libraries, and so on.  You'll
> need them all to be in your PATH, since the Makefiles will expect them
> to be readily available.
>

It seems really weird to me that to build an open source project i have
to buy an expensive proprietary IDE from Mircosoft

Is this still true?
is there a workaround?
how hard would it be to change this?