If my employer is a MS Gold Partner, what am I allowed to install at home?

Question

Hi, usually my employer purchases an MSDN subscription per developer, which allows the developers to install things like visual studio at home (provided all the license restrictions are obeyed etc).

However now my employer is a Microsoft Gold Partner, and we don't seem to have our own MSDN subscriptions any more. I have tried to read and understand the terms, but it seems a bit contradictory. Sometimes is seems like a site license, and other times it seems like you get a number of MSDN subs, and can apply for more.

I asked my boss and he has no idea either. At the moment it seems like a step backwards, we cant just log into MSDN and download something with our own sub, we have to go to the boss who logs in and downloads things for us etc.

It seems like being a Gold Partner allows the employer to save a bit of money but is a bit more restrictive from the developer perspective, or are we misunderstanding the license terms?

It would be great if I could go to the boss and ask him to burn me some dvds so I can get up to speed on some technology at home, like I used to when we had our own MSDNs, but we both want to be certain its still allowed under the Gold Partner terms.

Answer 1

Why not build yourself a virtual machine at work (belonging to them) and transport it back and forth on a portable HDD ? If you change jobs just give back the VM.

Another option is to have a look at Microsoft's BizSpark program and set yourself up a sideline business with it's own MSDN subsription.

Kindness,

Dan

Answer 2

As a gold partner you should have MSDN premium subs. https://partner.microsoft.com/40029254 have a look at the dev and test use licence tab.

The internal use licence allocated to gold partners wont help you at home im afraid. I would even question if an using multiple copies on Visual Studio is allowed under the MSDN licence. I'll assume this is one of the bits you would like to install at home.

Have a look at the use rights page for MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/subscriptions/cc150618.aspx. I don't think that alot of people are following the MSDN licences correctly. I certainly didnt think they were as restrictive as they are.

Answer 3

As I'm reading the page your company get's 25 MSDN licenses with the Gold Partner program. So your company should be able to issue these licenses out to each employee (and needs to do so, otherwise your accessing dev servers which were built using MSDN licenses, and your using MSDN software would be a license violation) which would allow you to log into MSDN under your own live account.

Your Partner admin should be able to issue these licenses.

That said, it's just like any other MSDN license. The license is to you, not your computer, so as long as you work at the company you would be able to use the MSDN software for development on any computer you wish. As soon as you were to leave the company you would have to stop using all software installed under these MSDN licenses.