Visual studio community edition commercial use and licensing headaches

Question

_{Wednesday, September 6, 2017 5:33 AM | 1 vote}

I run a small startup company ( 13 people inclusive of my partner ) with 7 .NET developers including me and I have 3 Visual Studio professional licenses, can I download and use Visual Studio Community edition for the remaining 4 developers?. The reason I ask this is because, I have been doing for the last 2 years now. My work involved doing small websites for overseas and local companies, my annual turnover is less than 1 million USD and I have around 15 PCS in all, some guys purportedly from M.S are insisting that we can't use community version for commercial development and that if we do so, revenue generated from the same needs to be shared with Microsoft. These guys who claim to be from M.S ( I suspect that they are Microsoft authorized re-sellers) and are harassing me and threatening me with legal action, I would like to know if what they say is indeed true because purchasing 4 licenses immediately is pretty expensive for me. I read the T&A and it does mention that Organizations which are not enterprises can use the Community edition if they are not an Enterprise for like 5 concurrent users. I should mention that I am in India.

I have done my due diligence and have read the licensing agreements below for both products and there doesn't seem to anything that forbids small businesses from using these products make commercial products like websites etc.Keep in mind that we are not re-distributing any of the actual components, we just use Visual Studio as an IDE and we could very well move to some other free software like SharpDevelop.

www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mt171547

www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mt171551

They have further informed me that I can't use Visual Studio Express for developing applications and selling them as that goes against Microsoft licensing laws, they are asking me to submit to a SAM audit, I don't trust these guys because they are also asking me to buy software that I don't need like Office 2016 and MSDN subscription for each employee in my office etc and loads of other stuff like SQL Server Standard edition etc.

Thanks!

All replies (2)

_{Wednesday, September 6, 2017 10:31 AM | 1 vote}

Hi horaceDsouza

I think this is not allowed according to the license agreement

You're definetly not a individual , you're a company not one developer.

a. Individual license. If you are an individual working on your own applications to sell or for any other purpose, you may use the software to develop and test those applications.

b. Organization licenses. If you are an organization, your users may use the software as follows:

· Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test your applications released under Open Source Institute (OSI)-approved open source software licenses.

· Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test your applications as part of online or in person classroom training and education, or for performing academic research.

· If none of the above apply, and you are also not an enterprise (defined below), then up to 5 of your individual users can use the software concurrently to develop and test your applications.

_{Thursday, September 7, 2017 3:04 AM | 7 votes}

Hi HoraceDsouza,

Welcome to MSDN forum.

>>I run a small startup company ( 13 people inclusive of my partner ) with 7 .NET developers including me and I have 3 Visual Studio professional licenses, can I download and use Visual Studio Community edition for the remaining 4 developers?.

If you are not an enterprise (defined below), then up to 5 **of your individual users can use visual studio community **concurrently to develop and test your applications.

An “enterprise” is any organization and its affiliates who collectively have either (a) more than 250 PCs or users or (b) one million U.S. dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in annual revenues, and “affiliates” means those entities that control (via majority ownership), are controlled by, or are under common control with an organization.

refer: MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO COMMUNITY 2017

After your company meets the requirement, visual studio community can be used for the remaining 4 developers.

Best regards,

Joyce

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