OSNews

Microsoft announced two significant licensing changes around Visual Studio that will be a boon for partners. First, the company said it will soon initiate a shared-source licensing program for Visual Studio and make the IDE's source code available to ISV partners for debugging purposes. Microsoft also removed a licensing restriction that previously limited use of the Visual Studio software development kit to development only around Microsoft's platforms: partners will now be free to create Visual Studio-based applications and extensions on Linux and other non-Windows platforms.