Is it legal for me to use Visual Studio Community Edition?

_{Wednesday, January 14, 2015 8:13 PM}

Hi,

Since the release of the Community Edition of Visual Studio I use it on my workstation at home to work on personal projects (mostly just educating myself).

However, I was wondering if it was legal for me to use it at work. You see, we have a dedicated team of .NET developers. The team consists out of +/- 20 dedicated developers and +/- 10 other guys that work purely on project basis. They all use VS Pro and Ultimate licenses.

I am in no way part of that team, but I do the occasional development on my own, mostly just building tools and small-scale applications to help myself and my colleagues with everyday work. None of these are used as production applications for our business.  I don't work on any of the code that's in the repo's of the devs, and neither do they touch my code. We don't collaborate.

Under these circumstances, is it legal for me to use the community edition? I'm essentially working as a single developer. We do get audits quite often, so I don't want to cause any trouble.

_{Wednesday, January 14, 2015 8:40 PM ✅Answered | 2 votes}

I don't think using it at work, unless just for yourself, or for open source work, will be legal. Read this:

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

If this explanation is still not clear, because your issue is about Visual Studio Community Edition 2013 license, I suggest that you can call 1-800-426-9400, Monday through Friday, 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. (Pacific Time) to speak directly to a Microsoft licensing specialist.