Saw this post on Slashdot about Microsoft making full versions of some of their developer tools available to students for free.
The following software is included:
- Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment
- Expression Studio, graphic design and Web site
- XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program.
- Windows Server Standard Edition
- SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
In the press release they specifically mention competing with Adobe and open source software.
I know this topic has come up recently in discussions concerning ColdFusion IDEs. It will be interesting to see which way Adobe is going to go. Do you give it away like Microsoft in hopes that people will become hooked? Or do you charge and hope people will pay for features?
With more and more powerful software becoming available for free (Eclipse, JDevelop, etc) it will be interesting to see how ‘traditional’ software companies like Microsoft and Adobe stay in the game.
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3 Comments
What is interesting is I moved to Eclipse because of CFEclipse and the overall cost. However, within on year, I moved to the Professional (i.e. paid) version of Aptana. The extra features and support makes all the difference to me. I can see as a student free being everything (must save money for beer) and a great incentive, but in a world where I get paid for being efficient, I would gladly pay for those extra features and not having to spend my time haggling together open source and/or free software just to get my work done.
I think MS is on the right track. They keep the students away from the Open Source this way and also plant the seed in their head for when they are in the business world and helping to make the decisions of where and what to spend the IT budget on.
Mike - what features in the Pro version of Aptana are you using? Just curious…
I needed the SFTP portion.
I know I could get a third party app, but getting everything integrated into my IDE makes me happy. And I tried to do it with other plugins for Eclipse and wasted way to much time on it.