Microsoft goes open source.. be still my heart!
There’s a LOT of money to be made in FOSS... it’s called support contracts. FINALLY Microsoft is getting the point.
And more good news to developers...
Microsoft Launches Free, Unrestricted Version Of Visual Studio For Small Teams
Excerpt
Microsoft today launched the Community 2013 edition of Visual Studio, which essentially replaces the very limited Visual Studio Express version the company has been offering for a few years now.
There is a huge difference between Visual Studio Express and the aptly named Visual Studio 2013 Community edition, though: The new version is extensible, so get access to the over 5,100 extensions now in the Visual Studio ecosystem. It’s basically a full version of Visual Studio with no restrictions, except that you can’t use it in an enterprise setting and for teams with more than five people (you can, however, use it for any other kind of commercial and non-commercial project).
“The simple way to think about this is that we are broadening up access to Visual Studio,” Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Developer Division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me in an interview late last month. Somasegar told me that the Community Edition will allow you to build any kind of application for the Web, mobile devices, desktop and the cloud. “It’s a full features version of Visual Studio,” he noted. “It includes the full richness of the Visual Studio extensions and ecosystem.”
This means you get access to all the usual Visual Studio tools like Peek, Code Analysis, Graphical Debugging and more.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE REST....
Actually, call me daddy, but Microsoft was a VMS/Unix shop long before its DOS or Windows days. In fact, Windows was built using VMS systems.
How many Linux users register their systems when installing for being counted as Linux users? Not many at all, because the choice of registering causes a message to be sent over the Net from their computers with statistics about their install. People are too paranoid for even that, so there’s no way to count many of them. There’s really no personal risk in doing so (no critical private info sent).
