On November 12 Microsoft announced a new edition of Visual Studio called Visual Studio Community 2013. Effectively this is the same as Visual Studio Pro except that it's free for individual developers, students, and for use on open source projects. Brad Sams comments at Neowin:
This is a big step for Microsoft by offering a free version of their premier development tool for noncommercial use. By allowing anyone to have access to the application, it will help bolster the Microsoft development community and that is likely the intended reason for making the tool free.
What does the Soylent community think of this new offering?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Visual Studio Free for Open Source Projects
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 41 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(Score: 2, Informative) by http on Sunday November 16 2014, @03:39PM
MS has always exerted a lot of effort to get students to use their products. I know that when I was a student, they offered full MSDN memberships at preternaturally low rates in partnership with the institution.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @03:42PM
At least the students don't have to use Eclipse.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pnkwarhall on Sunday November 16 2014, @10:12PM
MS is not alone in this - it's a pretty common tactic.
When I attended public school, Macs were everywhere and now I read about school systems giving out 1000s of ipads -- these purchases were almost certainly not at MSRP. At university, Oracle DBMS and Adobe tools were freely available on schools systems, and personal copies were heavily discounted.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Sunday November 16 2014, @03:47PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday November 16 2014, @04:00PM
More of a 'too little, too late' for me.
Now if i could just find a linux distro free of the NSA... :(
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 16 2014, @04:43PM
Red Flag Linux? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by rliegh on Monday November 17 2014, @04:36AM
http://www.openbsd.org [openbsd.org]
I just tell 'em the truth and they think it's trolling!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by boristhespider on Sunday November 16 2014, @04:14PM
You've been able to get a compiler for Windows for free for quite some time now. The IDE itself was gimped, but the compiler(s) shipped with VS Express were fine. (Well, as fine as they ever were, which given the shonky C++11 support in MSVC10 isn't really all that 'fine'.) And the debugger was the usual VS debugger, which is a very nice one. Indeed, the main reason I develop in VS on Windows is the debugger.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 16 2014, @04:39PM
Are you sure it wasn't photoshopped instead?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by boristhespider on Sunday November 16 2014, @04:48PM
Nah, it's all proprietry on that side of the fence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:36PM
Your sig is wrong; natural numbers are a subset of real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @11:20PM
His sig mentions *the* real numbers. If it was just "real numbers" you'd have a point. His sig states when reworded that there are more than zero numbers in the real set which you cannot count.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 18 2014, @03:27PM
No.
But the natural numbers are not the real numbers.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday November 16 2014, @04:19PM
Plus it's a bit less than should be expected, what with it still being an additional download, with field of use restrictions.
What's wrong with it being an extra download? Linux doesn't force you to keep gcc installed, so why should VS be forced on all Windows users? The alternative is forcing everybody to have it installed, which is just unnecessary bloat to people that don't want it, and also the same kind of monopoly-abusing product tying that happened with Internet Explorer.
As for the restrictions, it's to be expected. Microsoft's main business is selling to business, so from a business perspective it's smart to make it free to practically everyone but businesses. Acknowledging it and allowing non-business use legitimately is better than selectively ignoring piracy to build a user base the way Adobe does. Sure, it's not as free as Eclipse or a text editor and gcc, but there's enough room in the market for both.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday November 16 2014, @04:58PM
It's really pretty ridiculous to ship an OS with no compiler in the first place, then try to charge extra for it after the fact.
What's ridiculous about that? Not that it's entirely true in any case (VC++ Express etc), but when 99.9% of the people using the OS in question will never even need to know what a compiler is, let alone use one...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2, Insightful) by jmorris on Sunday November 16 2014, @07:28PM
Yes, 99% of windows users never needed the compiler. They never needed Windows either, or even a traditional OS. Why do you think that the second the monopoly cracks people flee by the million? Netbooks, tablets, Chromebooks, smart TVs and net enabled settop boxes all fly off the shelves.
Soon we will see a more fair fight over the Workstation where people who use computers as mind extensions pick the preferred tools. And Microsoft is going to find the pengiun already sitting there staring at them as they try to retreat from the mass market PC.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by boristhespider on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:30PM
That's entirely off-topic. The original statement concerned it being ridiculous that a compiler isn't shipped with windows. The reply was that that assertion is, itself, ridiculous because practically no-one wants a compiler. (There are even Linux distributions that are not by default shipped with a compiler. Mint, for instance, tends to install without a compiler.) There are many reasons to attack Microsoft (and other OSs), but not shipping a compiler by default isn't one of them.
(Score: 4, Informative) by choose another one on Sunday November 16 2014, @06:38PM
It's really pretty ridiculous to ship an OS with no compiler in the first place, then try to charge extra for it after the fact.
really ? why ? Loking back over 30+ yrs of various OSes I have used, seems to me it is perfectly normal, and Unix / Linux is in fact the odd one out for including a compiler
Also, a compiler for which language ? Far as i am concerned if it isn't Fortran then you are going to have to get a separate compiler to do any _real_ programming anyway, so I don't see the issue.
OTOH from vague memory:
ZX Spectrum - No
BBC Micro - No
Several different CP/M systems - No
VAX VMS - Not sure, not involved in buying or installing OS, pretty sure the compilers we _used_ (see Fortran note above) were separately licensed
Classic Mac OS - No
IBM 360 - Not sure, not involved in buying or installing OS, might have come with Fortran and COBOL but knowing IBM I bet they were paid extras)
DOS - No
Various embedded OSes - No, cross compiler sdks licensed separately from OS
Amiga OS - No
Windows - No
Android - No (think it is cross compiler only, don't think there is a native one ?)
iOS - No (think it is cross compiler only, don't think there is a native one ?)
Unix - Yes, with the caveat that with some versions the native C compiler was non-standard and practically useless and might as well just have been a link to download the GNU tools (looking at you 1980s HP-UX). Also can't remember whether SDKs / compilers were separate distribution with SCO and Coherent, think they might have been with one of them.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday November 16 2014, @07:55PM
You left out the Apple ][ series and Atari. They only came with an interpreter....of course since it was built-in most people didn't care.
A lot of the early personal computers came with an interpreter, but no compiler. Going back a bit further, I think the S-100 computers usually only came with an assembler.
"Compiler" isn't the key idea here, though. The key idea is development tools. Java would count these days, but so would Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, etc. I expect even some dialects of Logo would count. (The one I used was ridiculously constrained, but that's not inherent in the language.) I'm not sure that EMACS would count.
And now there is identified a problem: There's too many choices. Apple generally solves this by anointing one language as the official system language, and other languages must fit in around it. MS generally doesn't really build anything in. It doesn't like supporting programming languages. Even when it tries it generally does a half-assed job. (Anyone remember J+? Yes, Sun sued them, but that was because they wouldn't live up to their contract.) This is probably a sign that MS is getting ready to discontinue Visual Studio.
Apple has done a good job of supporting several different languages in sequence. (I'm still not sure why they abandoned Object Pascal, but Objective C is a good alternative. And nothing's perfect.) OTOH,, note that Apple's languages only run on Apple (just like Visual Studio C++ only runs on MSWind), because of custom libraries. When MS announces that they are releasing .NET source code, I just think "O, they're giving up on .NET", not "What a nice company", because it's my expectation (hopefully wrong) that the code will only be useful on MSWind machines. It's like if Apple were to release Carbon...would you expect that it would quickly be adapted to run on non-Apple machines? I'll bet that it's densely packed with calls to Apple system routines.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Sunday November 16 2014, @11:08PM
You left out the Apple ][ series and Atari. They only came with an interpreter....of course since it was built-in most people didn't care.
A lot of the early personal computers came with an interpreter, but no compiler. Going back a bit further, I think the S-100 computers usually only came with an assembler.
"Compiler" isn't the key idea here, though. The key idea is development tools.
I only listed ones (that I can remember) that I used owned or worked with at some point.
And interpreters or generalised "dev tools" really don't count - otherwise Windows is also a "yes" because it comes with various interpreters (cmd, powershell, cscript/vbscript and of course javascript in IE, which includes a JIT compiler I think....) and notepad.
But the reality is that what people invariably mean when they say "OS should come with compiler" is that the OS should come with a C compiler and toolchain and be Unix, because that is their world view, and they don't get that the rest of the non-Unix world doesn't actually work like that - I've used Unix and Linux a lot, and like it, but for me it's one OS of many, not my entire world.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday November 18 2014, @12:22AM
I consider the basic interpreter on my old Sinclair to count just fine. I dont think there was ever a compiler for the machine even produced - that was how it was used. You wrote your glue in basic and your inner loops in hex and you had all the tools right there.
Now imagine if instead the OS it shipped with would, by default, only load external programs from media. So you could buy my program on casette and load it and run it, but if I sent you the source printed out you couldnt do anything with that. Not without buying another casette with the 'developers tools.' How would our experience with computers have been different as a result if not just Sinclair, but all the old micros had taken that tack?
And yes, windows does ship with some powerful tools by default. But those are _not_ the tools that are recommended for general development. If you asked Sinclair how to develop programs, he would tell you to learn his Basic, learn Z80, and use them. He wouldnt tell you the first step was to buy extra software.
If you ask MS what you need to get started they arent actually going to tell you a compiler is needed, they will go further and specify an IDE as well. So, from my point of view at least, it's about time they started giving one away for free, and I think it should be included on the install disks. It's not like they dont usually have enough space left blank anyway, and it's not like they dont include a tonne of useless junk that could be trimmed to make room for something that is actually important if need be anyway.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by boristhespider on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:33PM
The Speccy (and BBC, and most other 80s home computers) did at least ship with BASIC interpreters. I suspect many of our first experiences in programming were on the built-in interpreters. Since I had a Speccy, that means that for quite a while I had a lot of experience with Sinclair's, hmm, idiosyncratic syntax. I still prefer it to other BASICs, not that that says much.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 17 2014, @05:32AM
Tell me, Mr. Anderson... what good is a GPL software... if you're unable to compile the source code?
(yes, I know: none on your list was a commodity hardware running whatever you want. But some are younger and grew with GPL/FLOSS most of their professional life: they have other life experience, thus other expectations)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Monday November 17 2014, @11:35AM
Tell me, Mr. Anderson... what good is a GPL software... if you're unable to compile the source code?
Maybe you have to pay for a compiler for the right language and platform to exercise your freedom to modify ?
Or the right library / sdk - what use was GPL Motif software if you didn't have Motif to rebuild it (back in the 80s/90s when it was proprietary) ? The answer is that it was just as useful on platforms that didn't come with Motif (in fact most of the Unixen I used) as it was on platforms that did, and I was just grateful for those who compiled and distributed the binaries so I could use it without Motif. The FSF, similarly, must have thought it was some use because they also distributed GPL code for Motif back when Motif was proprietary.
What use is any software without a machine to run it on and electricity to power it ?
OMG you might have to _pay_ to exercise your freedom 0 ? Yes, so why is the same a problem for freedom 1 ?
Freedom to do something, Mr Smith, does not mean you can do it for free.
some are younger and grew with GPL/FLOSS most of their professional life: they have other life experience, thus other expectations
I don't think it is an age thing. I recall many discussions last century around the GPL + Motif issue (and typically comparison with QT) where it was stated that Motif was allowed as a GPL "system library" because someone at FSF had said so (and all I ever found was references to such a statement and never an original, they must have done in effect because they shipped GPL code for linking to Motif). To me, it never made sense because even on the commercial Unixen I used in late 80s Motif was a paid optional extra, but to someone at FSF at some point earlier in time, it appeared to be a standard system library (I believe that earlier when Unix was more expensive Motif was more commonly bundled). Given the timeframes I expect whoever made that ruling at FSF is older than me, not younger.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 17 2014, @12:13PM
You are right, of course.
I'll add to it: freedom is not pure black and white. This is why you aren't going to blame one for choosing (or wanting or expecting) more of it even if one can't hope to get it in its entirety.
Mmmm... how come at that time it didn't make sense for you, but nowadays you accept/argue that free software may (is allowed to) use or require non-free components? (see above, that's what you argued: pay for the compiler, use it to compile free software)
You sure age doesn't have anything to do with it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday November 18 2014, @11:18AM
In the beginning, GNU/GPL Free Software _always_ required the use of proprietary software to run and frequently to build it - that is the entire reason for the "system library" exception in the GPL. That was until (to paraphrase rms) Linus came along and created the one teeny weeny missing piece of the GNU OS (the bit that rms could not do, the kernel).
However, as well as possibly requiring proprietary platform / OS / compiler, GPL Free Software always required that any GPL program you built, as an independent work, had to be GPL as a whole, with no non-Free bits linked in. That was the compromise - non-free platforms and compilers were OK, but each separate program must be wholly free. I believe there was some discussion within the FSF about dropping all support (presumably in the license too) for proprietary platforms when Linux became useful, which sounds like what you would like, I don't know which side of that debate rms was on, but I know that GNU/FSF didn't take that direction.
The nasty ugly bit of that compromise was always the vague and subjective system libraries exception, necessary to support proprietary platforms but close to nonsensical on a free platform. The bit that I never understood was how Motif _on Linux_ qualified to be distributed linked with GPL code under that exception, on the basis that it normally shipped as a system library with some-other-OS - but that is a completely different thing to the general requirement that you might need a proprietary OS and tools to build and use some GPL software.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 17 2014, @02:43PM
And of course it's easy to think of commercial systems that did not ship fully equipped but charged extra, that's the whole point. It's a silly and ultimately self-defeating policy (since your platform needs developers to thrive, erecting barriers to keep developers out is long-term harmful, even if short-term profitable) of exactly the type that business majors cannot resist.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday November 17 2014, @04:39PM
BBC Micro - No
Well, kind of. It shipped with a BASIC interpreter and an integrated assembler. You could produce asm strings from BASIC and have them assembled, so it wasn't uncommon for BASIC programs to do a little bit of JIT compilation themselves for hot loops and so on.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday November 18 2014, @10:37AM
I know - I've written thousands of lines of 6502 assembler on that platform - but the original point was that it was that it was "ridiculous to ship an OS with no compiler", which is clearly false as shown by our BBC Micro experience - sometimes no compiler is needed.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @04:12PM
MS has long offered Express Editions of their compilers (C++, C#, etc) which support development using the Visual Studio IDE of apps for noncommercial use. They were a free download and I've used them sporadically in the past. The C++ compiler includes use of the standard libraries, etc.
So now this is effectively an Express Edition on steroids, it includes more (but by no means all) of their enterprise tools. I'm not sure the average developer would notice the difference. On the projects where you might really want those specialized tools, the restriction to noncommercial use would probably start to chafe.
In general I think it's great that vendors offer these express editions, it makes good business sense for them because it expands their community. Developers developers developers developers as a certain basketball magnate once said.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 16 2014, @07:19PM
The express editions are one language only. Ya gotta jump through some hoops to get multiple languages installed.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday November 16 2014, @04:43PM
This thing doesn't run on Linux, so I don't really care. I wouldn't want to develop on a Windows computer and test on Linux. All of my development workflows for many years have been created for Linux, and I have a lot of scripts and commands and no desire to port them. MS is late to the free IDE game, something even Apple has done by now. (Apple gets their pound of flesh if you want to test the code you've written on an actual iOS device.) I guess MS wants colleges to teach this IDE to "coders", but as long as I can remember colleges have taught Visual Basic introductory classes and VS has always been available.
Not sure who the target audience is: I guess "coders" who want a drool-proof IDE will love this, but as a developer, I've always found that IDEs were more trouble than they're worth, and get in the way. Anything I could do in an IDE, I could write a script to do. So the target audience of "coders" working on Windows would already have VS Express. I can't imagine real programmers doing kernel development or writing programming languages would have much use for this thing. So I'm a little puzzled as to who they want to use the thing.
Beware of MS as an IDE vendor: Microsoft has broken Visual Studio's build process many times in the past, switching back and forth from from binary build files to makefiles, and they have their own version of make that's incompatible with Linux make. That always made me want to avoid MS development tools. Now, of course, everyone writes a custom build tool and source code control system for everything, and rewrites them constantly, so I guess it's not a big deal these days. You never use the same build tool twice. Reinventing the wheel instead of improving existing tools is the bad part of "open source" - or is it "community software" now? Any word as long as it doesn't remind you of freedom.
But, like someone else pointed out, no matter how bloated it is, it can't be worse than Eclipse. That's the one I can't figure out why anyone uses it. VS is like a bad dream, but Eclipse is like a horror movie.
One really interesting thing: I am interested in their Android emulator. The default emulator is terrible. I still haven't got Android 5 to actually run on it. It used to just be the slowest thing ever (and I have a fairly powerful computer), but now it seems to not work at all. I would even run their emulator on Windows if it actually worked. Google is really hurting themselves by providing such a substandard emulator, and hopefully this will be a kick in Google's rear end to be out-Androided by MS.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @05:11PM
What a confused summary, the two are mutually exclusive. And no, I did not watch the video. If there is no transcript it's not worth my attention.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @05:31PM
From the horse's mouth: [visualstudio.com]
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 > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
Q: How does Visual Studio Community 2013 compare to other Visual Studio editions?
A: Visual Studio Community 2013 includes all the great functionality of Visual Studio Professional 2013, designed and optimized for individual developers, students, open source contributors, and small teams.
--------------------------
Does that answer all of your questions about licensing? No, it probably doesn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @07:04PM
Thank you.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by jmorris on Sunday November 16 2014, @07:36PM
Can't find the actual EULA and you can't depend on the press, especially the Windows press, to know the details but 'free for non-commercial use' means unusable for Free Software and thus just a head feint.
Free Software has to include RedHat Inc., IBM, Apple, Google and the other highly commercial entities who use and contribute to Free Software. I know Microsoft and their media like to maintain the myth that Free Software is smelly people in their mom's basement and probably a hippy or communist.... but it wasn't true then and is pretty obviously untrue now when lwn maintains a list of the top contributers to each new linux kernel version and people without a corporate backer are a small minority and have been since the list started being created.
(Score: 1) by tadas on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:16PM
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.
In other words, they're explicitly granting the right to use the product to produce "open source" software to "RedHat Inc., IBM, Apple, Google and the other highly commercial entities who use and contribute to Free Software", given that all "free software" (in the Stallmanian sense) counts as "Open Source" (in the ESR sense). The only thing they're excluding is the 5-users-for-free exemption to produce closed source software that they're granting to individuals and smaller companies.
Visual Studio Community is not, itself, free software, but there seems to be no problem in using it to *produce* free software.
Stop trolling.
(Score: 1) by bornagainpenguin on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:25PM
There is no further text because the one documenting their experience was extinguished. Their light shall be missed.
(Score: 1) by pnkwarhall on Sunday November 16 2014, @10:19PM
I appreciated this response as opposed to another repetition of the mantra. It gets old to read the same thing constantly, but it's good to be reminded.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 2, Funny) by anubi on Monday November 17 2014, @02:33AM
You might as well distribute plans for how to build houses for free. It just increases the demand for nails.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by Wrong Turn Ahead on Monday November 17 2014, @05:07AM
I certainly wouldn't trust any binaries created with VS. I miss the days when big companies weren't trying to help Linux or Open Source in general...