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Comment by pbowyer | Hacker News Reader

"Visual Studio Community 2013 is free for any non-enterprise application development."

What's left out to make it non-enterprise development? Or to put it another way - how are they restricting its usage & preserving sales of Visual Studio?

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I believe what they mean by "non-enterprise application development" is the slightly later on clarification saying "for teams of up to 5 people" (or less than 5 people, I forget exactly). So likely you will get a free license, which you can use to register up to the max number for community, and if you try anything beyond that it will ask you to buy a license. Or something along that line.

They also mention that Community has the full power of Visual Studio with no features really removed. It's just the licensing for whatever size teams that matters.

It's kind of funny; it's not like the price of the actual license is a big obstacle for anyone making money with the tool -- but managing the licenses and staying compliant -- now that's a cost I don't want. Just like windows licenses. Is it per user? Per core? Per CPU? Can I have any number of (vm) instances per cpu? Per server, or was it per cpu socket? Can I upgrade? Can I upgrade the hardware and keep the license? It's madness - I don't have time to waste on crap like that.

From what I have seen this is essentially Visual Studio Professional with a license restriction for enterprise use. There is, at least was not in the previews I have worked with, no actual limitation built into the software, it is purely a licensing limitation.

More precisely, what is "non-enterprise"?

There is also this phrase which is even more vague:

and for teams with more than five people

Per-seat licensing I can understand, but what constitutes a "team"? If I use it to develop an application, I'm not allowed to share the source code with more than 4 others? That doesn't make any sense.

"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 > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above."

"or > $1MM in annual revenue"

Ouch, just $1 million in revenue? That's a definition of "enterprise" that's going to exclude nearly every non-tiny business.

Probably mega million. Hard to maintain > 250PCs on just $1M in revenue.

Leave it to Microsoft to complicate licensing.

I've long used the compiler included with the Windows SDK for automated testing of our C API. Since the latest versions of the SDK no longer include a compiler, I'll need to use some edition of Visual C++, for which I had assumed that Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop (say that three times fast) would suffice. If Community replaces Express, I'll no longer have a freely available tool chain to deploy throughout the testing lab.

I guess I'll have to reread the terms of my MSDN subscription to see whether it's kosher for me to install Visual Studio on systems where other people are running my tests, or if they'll need subscriptions too.

If it's just the base edition, it's missing a lot of the more powerful code analysis and testing tools, as well as team management stuff. More than likely though, it's going to be a licensing thing. There's plenty of software out there that has a full-featured non-commercial version that relies on large companies not wanting to get sued to sell commercial licenses.

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