You honestly don't need the full version to make great stuff. Yeah, there are some features, but I don't use most of them.
..You do live in a capitalistic society you know ;) People make things to sell them. Sometimes there's a specific business advantage to giving something away for free, but I can't imagine that the returns from doing that would be more than the returns from people buying Visual Studio.
Sorry for the harsh(ish) words, but this is America, and you don't get much for free. The ad-driven revenue model is beautiful, amazing, capitalistic communism, but not applicable to everything.
But in the world of information goods (I'm not going to link to the book, you know where you can get it:-), the externalities created by giving something away for free might be worth more in the long run than the foregone revenue from said product. Or, in the immortal words of Steve Ballmer, "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!".
..You do live in a capitalistic society you know ;) People make things to sell them. Sometimes there's a specific business advantage to giving something away for free, but I can't imagine that the returns from doing that would be more than the returns from people buying Visual Studio.
Sorry for the harsh(ish) words, but this is America, and you don't get much for free. The ad-driven revenue model is beautiful, amazing, capitalistic communism, but not applicable to everything.