Can Visual Studio Code be used for commercial purposes?

Question

I am from Turkey and I work as freelancer at my home (developing and selling web templates).

Is using Visual Studio Code for commercial purposes like this legal?

Answer 1

I suspect that you are suffering from a common confusion, namely between the license under which a software publisher grants access to a product's source code and the license a software publisher grants to end users to use the software.

For Visual Studio Code, the latter says:

General. You may use any number of copies of the software to develop and test your applications, including deployment within your internal corporate network.

The license to use the software does not depend on whether the use is commercial. As it happens, the source code is licensed under the MIT license, which is very permissive, so you probably can even use the source code in a commercial project.

We had a question like this one about Word some months ago. You can't make commercial software that includes components of Word, at least not under the standard end-user license, but you can use Word to write commercial news articles, novels, training manuals, and so on.