It gets recommended by the r/homelab folks who haven't adopted Proxmox. VMware still have a program like this going for their admin user base. License auditing was real and gave visibility into this usage. Later, these may stop being eligible for MSDN use and generate more revenue. For companies, it could mitigate some of the costs associated with the proliferation of environments that needed to be licensed from top-to-bottom. individual devs would frequently use some of the loopholes through licensing partners to commit to what was basically a three year subscription that spread the cost.

It was priced and designed for companies to be buying as a bundle with other licensing. People give SP a hard time quite rightly, but as a revenue generator for devs in many markets with limited options, it was a very good choice. NET devs who jumped to SharePoint in the 2000s to keep their top rates.

As an example, the cost was fairly insignificant to the many. It was still within reach so devs could get it and be productive. Individual developers paying was always an insignificant volume.

Download copilot phpstorm