VS 2005 Pricing and Licensing

Theres a lot of commotion about the Visual Studio 2005 en Team Foundation server licensing going on. Microsoft released their new pricing model and it seems you’ll have to pay a lot of money for a single version of Team System (where there are three, developer, architect and tester) and you’ll have to purchase Team Foundation server separately for $2.799.

The problem many people have is, of course the amount of money. They are starting to compare the package with IBM/Rational’s suite. And whenever something is ridiculously expensive, people tend to compare it with that suite as “it’s in the range of Rational’s suite”.
But another problem stated, is the fact that a lot of (independent) developers will never purchase the suite, won’t work with it (at home) and will not recommend the package to their customers because they’re not familiar with it. Currently, they/we recommand Visual Studio 2003 with a lot of smaller tools like MSBuild, nUnit, TestDriven.NET, nDoc, and so on. Why would we do the same, if we can’t even test if the program is working and fullfilling our (project’s) needs?

Mark Gunderloy wraps up nicely [the whole new pricing scheme for Visual Studio 2005 and Team System editions](http://www.larkware.com/editorials/vs2005.html). Eric Bowen also [created a post](http://scrappydog.com/blog/archive/2005/03/21/1412.aspx) on the topic, on which Prashant Sridharan responds that they could net let people pay multiple times for a server license. When they’d sell it with the product (developer, architect or tester) you’d be buying the server version with every package, paying an enormous amount of money. I really don’t get why he’s refering to it, we just want Team Foundation Server as a seperate download from our MSDN Universal subscription.

But I’ve also asked myself why they’d provide three different products. Why this special architect version? When I’m the developing architect, or the architecting developer, need I install two versions? Or when I’m the testing developer (which I’m currently am, yuck!) or the developing tester… You get the point.

To sum things up, take a look at this post from Rick LaPlante in which is a clean diagram of the costs. After reading it all, you can decide if you want to place a vote against the licensing scheme in Microsoft’s feedback center. Update: As it seems, Microsoft has some time to think about it, as Microsoft has pushed the release of VS2005 back a bit more… Are we thinking 2006 already!? 🙂
Via [tweakers.net]