Who can use VS 2013 Community Edition for free? (No, it&#39;s not everyone) Here&#39;s the official word...

Earlier today the Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition was announced, This IS the Visual Studio you've been looking for... Hello Visual Studio Community Edition!. The question is, who can legally use this edition?

Well funny enough, there's a new version of Visual Studio and MSDN Licensing White Paper that covers just that...

Visual Studio and MSDN Licensing White Paper

This white paper provides an overview of the Visual Studio product line, including MSDN subscriptions, and the licensing requirements for those products in common deployment scenarios.

Version: 1.0

File Name:

Visual Studio 2013 and MSDN Licensing Whitepaper - November-2014.docx

Visual Studio 2013 and MSDN Licensing Whitepaper - November-2014.pdf

Date Published: 11/12/2014

This white paper provides an overview of the Visual Studio product line and the licensing requirements for those products in common deployment scenarios. For a definitive guide to licensing terms and conditions for products licensed through Microsoft Volume Licensing, see the Microsoft Licensing Product Use Rights (PUR) document and applicable licensing agreements. For retail customers the license terms are specified in the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) included with your product or with your MSDN subscription.

Here's a snip directly from the doc;

Visual Studio Community 2013

Visual Studio Community 2013 is a free, full-featured IDE for any developer building non-enterprise apps across any platform or device. It includes all the capabilities needed to create compelling non-enterprise applications, including powerful productivity features, mobile development tools for Windows, iOS and Android, and access to thousands of extensions.

Who can use the software

Rights to use Visual Studio Community depend on the customer segment and usage scenarios as explained below.

Individual developers

Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community, to create their own free or paid apps.

Organizations

· An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.

· For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1M in annual revenue) no use is permitted for employees as well as contractors beyond the open source, academic research and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

Example 1: A University wants to use Visual Studio Community 2013 for training students enrolled in the “Data structures and Programming” course and for a “Big Data” academic research project that requires building a cross-platform mobile application. Further the University also plans to customize its ERP software and automate processes through its internal LOB applications. Visual Studio Community 2013 use is allowed by academic institutions for classroom learning environment and academic research and hence the University can use the software for its coursework and the research project. However Visual Studio Community 2013 cannot be used for developing and testing its internal LOB applications.

Example 2: A Fortune 500 firm has outsourced the development of its store-locator mobile application to a small agency. The application is not an open source project. The agency has 5 employees working on the project and would like to use Visual Studio Community 2013. Since the agency is a contractor developing this application for the Fortune 500 firm, and since the application is not an open source project, the agency cannot use Visual Studio Community 2013 for developing and testing the application.

Example 3: A Fortune 500 ISV is working on a mobile application which is released under the Open Source Institute (OSI)-approved open source software licenses. Employees and contractors developing and testing this application may use Visual Studio Community 2013.

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