Microsoft Visual Studio Professional Licensing

Question

Hello, We are a small financial Company (around 20 people) We are planning to buy the Visual Studio Professional 2008 Edition to build some Proprietary software for ourself. We have only 3 developers working on this software. The question is Can we distribute the application(just the exe) throughout the office. What are the restrictions?if any.

I went through the documentation provided by MS but its tought for me to digest or I did not get astraight forward answer Any help Appreciated.

,Can you please back your answers by some sort of Proofs(eg.links,docs etc ) from Microsft website? Thanks ThingkingCap

Answer 1

Yes you can distribute the application you build.

The licensing is for Visual Studio itself, which you may not distribute to more machines than you have licenses for.

Answer 2

There is no limitation to the distribution of the applications built with Visual Studio, so yes, you can without concern.

By the way: Why VS 2008 and not VS 2010?

Answer 3

Is there any specific reason you need the professional version? Visual Studio Express is free, and you can build any applicaitons you want and distribute them as much as you want.

All applications you build with visual studio have a royalty free, unrestricted license to distribute as you see fit. If you buy an third party components they may have different licenses, but anything that comes with visual studio is freely redistributable (as long as you follow the rules for redistributing the runtimes).

UPDATE:

If you want "proofs" from Microsoft, just read the EULA

Visual Studio 2008 Professional End User License Agreement

Answer 4

You can install Visual Studio only on machines you bought licenses for. So in your case you should get 3 licenses.

This will let you build/compile/code application that can be used on as many computers you want. You can even sell that application to anyone.

If you don't need additional functionality you could use Free Express Edition too. It can be used for production as well.

Answer 5

You still sound confused, so maybe if we use an analogy. Photoshop is used to create images. Let's say you buy 3 licenses to Photoshop, so that you can install Photoshop on 3 artist's machines. The artist make some images with Photoshop. The images can be distributed to anyone, througohut your office. The license only applies to the Photoshop application you installed. The images you create with the Photoshop application can be distributed as you see fit.

So, the licenses you own for Visual Studio give you the right to install the Visual Studio application on the developers machines that you bought licenses for. The developers then write some code, and compile that code into a new program. That program they compiled is their creation, and can be distributed however you want.