Visual Studio Community for commercial project outside windows store

Question

I want to develop a commercial win32 desktop application using Visual Studio Community edition 2015. It's good to say that I'm the only developer. Nobody else is going to join me. And I don't want to sell it in the windows store. Rather, distribute it commercially in my own website. Am I allowed to do this? I can't fully understand the vs community license. Additionally, if two of my friends join me(team of three), will that be allowed?

Dolliedolloff

Answer 1

The following clause from the Microsoft Software License Terms for Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015 is applicable:

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.

In other words, as an individual developer you can use Visual Studio Community 2015 to develop commercial software distributed through any distribution channel (including your own web site).

The next clause may be applicable, if you run a non-enterprise organization:

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

• ...
• 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.
• ...

In your specific case (team of 3) it would be legal to use Visual Studio Community 2015 to develop commercial applications, provided that you are a non-enterprise organization. An "enterprise" is defined as:

An "enterprise" is any organization and its affiliates who collectively have either (a) more than 250 computers or users or (b) more than one million US 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.

---

More details are available in the Visual Studio 2015 Licensing White Paper.

Varsity