Thanks for all these ideas Thomas!

>Thanks for looking and mentioning the old thread - I remembered doing the german / english version comparison, but not the specific question ;-)
>
>My advice would still be to put the question IN WRITING to a couple of existing MS email URIs as part of your due diligence.
>You already did invest your (and our) time into resolving the language, which from programmers POV is unclear.
>In the unlikely event that MS will go legal on you a year after the project is done, you have evidence that you did try to get a statement on the unclear parts from MS at a time when you would have been able to switch your dev stack, still/currently thinking along Gregs lines on how to interpret...
>
>Perhaps put the question up at more mainstream fora as Stackoverflow AND/or more .Net oriented groups like Codeproject, with the risk of being flagged as "unfitting question for SO" and link to those as well as these threads in your official question to MS - putting it more in marketing than legal, esp if you offer to post the answer you receive from MS in each thread ;-)
>
>Over here all answers from MS would be admissable if it comes to a legal hassle. Do NOT ask your friend for a written statement - ask him where to send the question, he is your friend and keep him that way by not endangering him to be potentially in the middle of a spat.
>
>This comes
>a) from the very personal way I try to do business: try to get a clear/unbiased picture first, then create some written doc about the state of things at the time.
>b) from some expirience of court decisions of cases involving personally known participants over here - it is a crap shoot, not programmers logic!
>c) from following the Oracle / Google spat: for me, the first Alsup ruling exempting API from copyright made most sense. Also in large part the statements of Sun about Java being OS when not owned by Oracle and the licensing changes done by Oracle AFTER aquiring Sun. See crap shoot above ;-))
>d) from reading published cases in others areas, esp. on the growing sub part of mediation being forced + favoring the large company side (TTIP issue here)
>
>;-)
>
>thomas
>
>>Thanks
>>
>>< later > I spoke with a friend of mine who works for Microsoft here and he put me on to their Visual Studio sales people and they have assured me that I can use the community edition for developing commercial apps!
>>
>>BTW, that email address doesn't exist anymore :)
>>
>>>I've never gotten much licensing clarification from Microsoft. Last I knew, you could use licensing@microsoft.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>I knew this conversation was familiar! I asked the very same thing about the licensing in November last year. MessageID# 1627580. That conversation was pretty inconclusive. I think the best suggestion was to contact MS and ask. Would you have an email address for someone in MS that it would make sense sending a query to?