title: VS 2010 Professional Retail box license question
body: <p>I'm trying to persuade my boss to purchase copies of Visual Studio 2010 Pro (Retail) for some of us team members to develop with so we can move to developing with .net 4.0 and mvc 3 when the time comes, but I'm getting some resistance. The confusion is on the licensing terms. </p>
  
  <p>It has always been my understanding that 1 retail purchase is good for 1 developer to develop code on. That code may then be used to create products that could be resold or what have you. I've been reviewing the licensing terms and the language is pretty confusing. I found a white paper on it here:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2b1504e6-0bf1-46da-be0e-85cc792c6b9d&amp;displaylang=en" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2b1504e6-0bf1-46da-be0e-85cc792c6b9d&amp;displaylang=en</a></p>
  
  <p>The white paper also provides a link to get the license for retail copies of various microsoft products. That url is: </p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualProperty/UseTerms/Default.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualProperty/UseTerms/Default.aspx</a></p>
  
  <p>(I selected Visual Studio, 2010 Pro Edition, English).</p>
  
  <p>On page 2 of the pdf, the following text is found (2.a)</p>
  
  <p>a. General. One user may install and use copies of the software to design, develop, test and demonstrate your programs. You may not use the software on a server in a production environment.</p>
  
  <p>I took this to mean that you can't actually install the development software on your production machine, but you can deploy whatever you have developed else where to production so long as that machine has the necessary licenses for Windows Server, Sql Server, Sharepoint, etc (pretty much whatever you're to use). Is this correct?</p>
  
  <p>Also, users aren't required to have a license to access a web application hosted on a production server are they? I'm specifically asking about Microsoft licenses a user might need to access, say, an intranet site developed by a licensed programmer using Visual Studio 2010 Professional. The question seems absurd to me, but I need some kind of clarification if at all possible.</p>