Microsoft is Giving Away Free Stuff

Well sort of anyway... They started this thing called BizSpark. Basically if you're a startup and you meet their criteria (less than 3 years operating, making less than their cutoff point which differs based on the country but for the US, UK, India, etc. it is $1mil) they basically give you a limited license (3 years only) for a number of their products. Well, you can still use Visual Studio, etc. for development/testing but you have to agree to their EULA (which isn't visible on the site from what I can tell). Oh I forgot a couple other things... You have to be developing something that is a SaaS if you want to deploy the hosted solution items, you can't do web hosting, be a web agency, do system integration, or do outsourced development. And once you're done with the program, you pay $100 and go on your way. Oh, did I mention that you might be charged $10,000 for "training" if you're using one of the network partners for hosting of your SaaS? It's in their whole legal, don't sue us if one of our network partners screws you over bit of the description... I'm guessing that, that wouldn't happen too often but kind of freaky to read that in the middle of everything else. Anyway, I thought it was interesting (even if most other companies have already started similar programs in the past), so if you're a startup (why you're here at this site I'll never know) give it a look.
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Posted by: James Craig
Posted on: 11/7/2008 at 10:22 AM
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Categories: General
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