Microsoft was very active in giving free licenses out for education, but those licenses often wouldn't allow for commercial use. If you've never been through a

Microsoft was very active in giving free licenses out for education, but those licenses often wouldn't allow for commercial use. If you've never been through a license audit, their legal team would usually make you pay through the nose or suffer through a lawsuit if they found you weren't using the right license for your dev tools. That said, they'd generally target bigger businesses over smaller dev-only shops.