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Alin-3694 avatar image
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Alin-3694 asked AnnaXiu-MSFT edited

Information needed related to VS Community edition license

Hello,

Sorry if this post does not belong here, but I did not knew a better place for it.

I have read the Visual Studio Community license usages and from what I understand, it's permitted for:
- individual use for making your own apps for any purpose
- if company not enterprise, up to 5 developers can use to develop and test your apps
- on enterprise no use except for specified cases (open source, drivers...)

From what I see there is a strong focus on own apps both for individual and company and doesn't really mention anything about for instance work under hire. Looking at licensing whitepaper there is an example of a Fortune 500 company, which I think means it's a enterprise, outsourcing to an agency and usage is not permitted. But it's unclear if it's because it's an enterprise or because the agency is contracted and project is not open source.

My questions are:
- a self employed is considered as individual?
- what happens in the case of an individual or small company which does freelancing/work under hire/contracting for others? In this case the developer does not make his own apps but for instance it creates a new app from scratch or updates an existing app for another individual/company not enterprise. So the owner is not the developer. Is Visual Studio Community Edition usage permitted in this case? I see nothing in the license that allows this usage.

Thank you very much for your time.



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SimpleSamples avatar image
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SimpleSamples answered SimpleSamples commented

Look at the PDF Microsoft Visual Studio Licensing. Page 8 says:

In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1M in annual revenue) no use is permitted for employees as well as contractors

And Example 2 on that page says:

Since the agency is a contractor developing this application for the Fortune 500 firm ... the agency cannot use Visual Studio Community 2019

I think therefore it is saying that unless your customer has either more than 250 PCs or their annual revenue is greater than $1M then you can use Visual Studio Community. If a client qualifies as being that large then it is very likely they are familiar with the procedure. I assume that the agency (you) would get a temporary license as appropriate from the customer, the large company.




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Unfortunately, agreements use vague language because it opens the door to interpretation. Some would say it allows for flexibility. Note that the term "user" is not defined in the license agreement. And the language dealing with enterprises speaks to employees and contractors, not users.

If the OP wants a legal interpretation then perhaps direct contact with the Microsoft department that handles licensing is something to consider.

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The terms employees and contractors have clear legal definitions; users does not. The American IRS defines the difference between employees and contractors for American tax purposes.


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Thank you. You do have a strong point but I really don't understand why it is so hard to make a concise license where the developer doesn't need to take things by exclusion. One cannot really base its business choices on "maybe the license allows it" and find out later that it was wrong. If it said, "as long as you are not an enterprise or are not developing/contracting/work under hire/freelancing for one, use the Community edition for any purpose."

I am looking at this mostly from the point of developing cross platform apps with Xamarin and soon MAUI. I do understand that a Business subscription isn't the end of the world however it doesn't sound that great when other options for instance Flutter or even Kotlin Multi Platform have a strong free IDE in Android Studio. Flutter seems to work really well also in Visual Studio Code.

Maybe someone from Microsoft could come and give us some more insights into this.

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In other words my attempt to help is useless; you will only accept a response from Microsoft.

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I have thanked you and I really appreciate you took time to dig into the whitepapers pdf.
I am not a native English speaker so maybe that is why the license text/terms could have some nuances that I don't get. However, the actual license text states pretty clearly: individual use for own apps, small company use for its apps. I don't see freelancing/contracting fitting into any of these conditions. I do get that the whitepapers could have some interpretation on the Fortune 500 example, but really, the developer agrees with the license and not the whitepapers.

I mean, if I take that sample that the agency is a contractor developing for a Fortune 500 company and cannot use it and alter it to the agency is a contractor developing for a non Fortune 500 company, the work created isn't its own and cannot use it well, the second one doesn't seem to fall into license terms either really.

At least, this is my understanding so far.
Thank you again for your time

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AnnaXiu-MSFT avatar image
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AnnaXiu-MSFT answered

Hi @Alin-3694 ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A!

For assistance with sales, subscriptions, accounts and billing for Visual Studio, please directly contact Visual Studio Subscriptions support.

Sincerely,
Anna


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