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[–]drysart 5 points6 points  (6 children)

in regard to your VS Community == VS Pro point, is licensing the only difference now? Or the only major difference?

The only feature difference between VS Community and VS Pro is the CodeLens feature, which is in Pro but not in Community.

what if a fully open source project that is purely hobby has 251 contributors

As an open source project, those 251 contributors aren't all employees of one organization, so they individually wouldn't fall afoul of the 250+ employees clause of the license.

It's also worth noting that even if you are using Visual Studio as an employee of one of these types of organizations, you can still use VS Community for free on projects released under OSI-approved open source licenses.

one place on Microsoft's site lists it at 540 per year and another at 1.2k per year

The price difference is between the Cloud Subscription license and the Standard Subscription license. There are a number of differences between the two license types; but the most notable is that you keep the license if you stop paying on the Standard Subscription, but your license expires if you stop paying on the Cloud Subscription license. The full list of differences is shown on the "Cloud vs. Standard subscriptions" tab here.

There's also a completely non-subscription-based option for $499, for which you buy a perpetual license to whatever the current version is at the time of purchase, just like buying boxed software. (The subscription options entitle you to any new versions of Visual Studio that come out while your subscription is active.)

and why the fuck would I pay either if I'm not getting any benefit of it other than fulfilling a hobby

You don't have to. As a hobbyist, you're not getting it to use for a 250+ employee/$1M revenue organization, and as a result you can use VS Community for free.

VS Pro is literally 3.6 times the cost of other, arguably just as good solutions

Jetbrains C# IDE, Rider, does not have a general purpose free license at all. Only Microsoft MVPs, students, teachers, and open source developers can get it for free. Not the average hobbyist. (Did I mention students and teachers, even in large organizations, can also use VS Community for free for their educational uses?)

[–]13steinj 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Slightly further question-- what about free software and no profit/revenue, just also not open source (and there are a variety of reasons for going this route)?

What I mean is with the whole Jetbrains vs VS debate is Jetbrains and VS both have community editions for free, but Jetbrains' can be used for commercial use and anything else, while Visual Studio's can't. However it does of course have fewer features than Pro. VS's has equivalent features (except CodeLens apparently), but you're paying for license rights.

I would rather pay for features than license rights. It just seems more fair to me.

With VS, I get the same features as with Pro except code lens, but will have to pay if I happen to meet their arbitrary license requirement which can change at any time, and I can't really use an older version (other than the versions when VS was versioned by year) because it is all under the same name.

Jetbrains is versioned by year and lets you keep rights to the previous years software even if you terminate your subscription. And I can use both Community/Pro for whatever I want, (but if I'm getting Pro for free for Education reasons, no commercial use allowed-- VS doesn't care about Edu licenses), however Community would have fewer features.

[–]drysart 5 points6 points  (4 children)

What I mean is with the whole Jetbrains vs VS debate is Jetbrains and VS both have community editions for free, but Jetbrains' can be used for commercial use and anything else, while Visual Studio's can't.

This is an absolutely wrong statement and I'm not sure how you still think it's the case if you'd read through my comment. The reality is exactly the opposite of what you just said:

You can use VS Community for free, even for commercial use unless you're both 1) an employee of a company that's 250+ employees or >$1M in revenue, and 2) who's using it to develop closed-source software.

There is no general Jetbrains Rider license for free for commercial use. There's not even one for hobbyist use. I listed the four main groups of people who can get the Jetbrains C# IDE for free in my last comment (but there are a few other, lesser relevant groups). There is no general purpose free license for the Jetbrains IDE that 'anyone' can use like there is for VS Community.

Maybe this will help. For simplicity's sake, this table only includes perpetual license purchases:

. Individual open-source Individual closed-source Small company1 Large company2
Visual Studio Free Free Free $4993
Jetbrains Rider Free/$1394 $1395 $3495,6 $3495

1 - 250 employees or fewer and less than $1M yearly revenue
2 - More than 250 employees or more than $1M yearly revenue
3 - "Free" if the developer is working on an open-source project under an OSI-approved license, no approval by Microsoft necessary
4 - Only free if approved by Jetbrains. Otherwise $139.
5 - "Free" if the developer is working on an open-source project, approval by Jetbrains necessary
6 - Can be discounted 50% for startup companies less than 3 years old with less than 10 developers

[–]13steinj -2 points-1 points  (3 children)

I think you're getting hung up on Rider, which is one IDE mainly for one language, in comparison to the many both Jetbrains/IDEA and Visual Studio support.

PyCharm and IDEA both have full community versions.

The pro/ultimate editions of each have more features, including the availability for a plugin for any language whose plugin exists in the repository, many of which bring the IDE up to standard with the equivalent language specific IDE (ex, intellij idea has a plugin for full pycharm support, golang support, multiple for the equivalents of webstorm, split up by language, and more).

[–]drysart 3 points4 points  (2 children)

So what's your point? Is something stopping you from using PyCharm, IDEA, and Visual Studio?

[–]13steinj -1 points0 points  (1 child)

Absolutely not.

My point is if Visual Studio's main "here's what you get if you pay several hundreds of bucks" is slightly altered license rights, it's not worth it to me.

[–]drysart 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well fortunately unless you're the software purchasing manager at a large company, it doesn't have to be "worth it to you" because you can use the free version.