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Microsoft is only a threat to JetBrains from where I'm standing and looking, I have a feeling they will fix up Xamarin the way we all hope they will. I really hope there will be a completely free option of Xamarin for Students and maybe even on BizSpark.

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There is already a free option of Xamarin for students.[1] Earlier there used to be a separate application process but now it is rolled into DreamSpark

[1]https://xamarin.com/student

There's also the "Starter Edition" for everyone else:

https://xamarin.com/starter

Thank you both, I did not know, looks like you already get it through DreamSpark that was really fast (in the case of Student).

Starter edition is pretty much useless. You may use it to "get a taste" of Xamarin, but you can't really make any useful apps with it.

If MS puts Xamarin licensing under MSDN I'd be really happy.

Or if they just release the Mono runtime under MIT (Mono requires all VM contributions to be licensed to them under MIT, they then turn around and release it under LGPLv2 and a commercial license - so it's legally doable without any effort). Microsoft's product strategy is getting .Net everywhere for free, making money on services and tooling - they don't need commercial Xamarin around to make their strategy work.

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