Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?
A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:
Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.
Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in 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 > $1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
It is less permissive than Express was though, isn't it? I was under the impression there were no restrictions on who could use Express. If Express goes away now, some organizations will be shut out of the Community Edition due to its licensing terms and have to pay.
If you're running a "non-enterprise" commercial development team with > 5 full time MS devs and you're building apps of any sort of complexity I suspect you won't be using the Express editions anyway. I'm one of two developers in a company of 12 and Express doesn't really cut the mustard for the stuff we're doing which is only moderately complex.
Also bear in mind you're still getting five free installs before having to shell out for your sixth developer. By that time I would also expect that your revenue stream is pretty healthy and the cost of developer tooling, relatively speaking, is a minor cost of doing business.
I work in a company that could be labelled as enterprise, thus I think I couldn't use the Community edition.
The problem is that I'm not one of the developers (I am a sysadmin), but I had installed the Express edition in the past for example to simply compile some code that I found online (free).
Same happened in my past companies, "real" developers were using full blown VS but I was sometimes doing some small project (not as side project, small = "quick hack that I needed and developers had no time to do that")
If they stop releasing Express edition (that's not clear, I've not searched if Community will superseed Express or if they'll keep both) it will be impossible for me to do so.
Having said that, I think this fully featured Community edition is interesting
The 250 users / $1 million revenue thing is a bit weird. Any tech company with more than 10 employees probably has upwards of $1 million/year in revenue. The salary bill alone will be pushing that quite quickly. There seems to be a huge disparity between 250 PCs and $1 million annual revenue. If you had 250 PCs with less than $1 million annual revenue you'd be paying each employee less than $4000 a year.
There are startups with 5-50 employees that have no revenue. I think the $1 million covers "established business", and 250 PCs covers "really well funded startup".
I suspect there are a number of businesses successfully using Express today who are going to have to pay up for MSDN / Professional licenses, assuming Express goes away.
That's why the license said "revenue" and not "profit", just to make sure you need to pay for it, even if your company play some weird tax tricks and has minimal or no profit each year.
It's not clear to me how this applies to agencies/development shops. Say small agency (< 10 developers) writing apps for their clients, some of which are enterprises.
I think the bigger issue would be knowing who is using it.
One team might think we only have 5 people so we'll use it! And a different team in another office might think the same. Oops.
Is "Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps" really that hard to understand? The other stuff reads as "if you have more than 250 PCs in your company, buy the damn thing." The exceptions they make are totally in developer's favor and proof that no matter what Microsoft does some people will bitch.
Well, that is bound not to be the binding legal document here, there must be quite a long contract that actually defines the terms. Nothing to do with Microsoft necessarily, that's just how lawyers are.
Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community? A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community: Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.
Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in 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 > $1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.