Can I use Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition for my sole employee LLC? [closed]

Question

I need to know whether or not I need to buy a license. I am the only person working on the software and I intend to keep it that way. I plan on producing a single Windows Store App and publishing it on the Windows App Store and sell it under my company's name.

Answer 1

You don't need to buy a licence so long as your corporation (and any affiliated entities) makes less than the equivalent of one million US dollars a year in revenue. As you're writing the software as employee of your corporation it's your corporation that needs to licence Visual Studio, not you as an individual. That means you need an "Organizational licence" which is granted under one of the following conditions from the Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015 Software Licence Terms:

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

• Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test your applications released under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved open source software licenses.
• Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test extensions to Visual Studio.
• Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test your applications as part of online or in person classroom training and education, or for performing academic research.
• 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.
• If you are an enterprise, your employees and contractors may not use the software to develop or test your applications, except for open source and education purposes as permitted above. An “enterprise” is any organization and its affiliates who collectively have either (a) more than 250 PCs 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.

I assume that the first three bullet points don't apply to you, so only the fourth one will, which only applies if the fifth bullet point doesn't.