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It has only been open source for a relative short amount of time when compared with other technologies like Node, RoR, etc.

.Net has historically cost money while providing somewhat similar features as open source competitors. Its why MS was forced into open sourcing it. They could not compete anymore.

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.NET itself has always been "free" (as in beer), it's just VS they made people pay for. They've had a community edition since VS2012 at least, possibly earlier but that's as far back as my brain goes.

The Community edition is pretty full-featured, it's only missing some TFS integration stuff, some test suite stuff and advanced profiling. I'd compare it to IntelliJ's free/pro model.

They also made people pay for Windows.

Before CE it was Visual Studio Express which was also pretty much the same.

Community Edition has restrictions on use for organizations.

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