The First Taste is Free

I do a lot of development at home.  I do not find my professional life provides experience on the edge of technology, so I have projects I work on to keep my skills sharp and, more importantly, to develop new ones.  When doing this, I use Microsoft Team Foundation Server.  I have a license to MSDN Premium through work so this is a no-cost operation for me.   It is a nice tool.

But...

Now some friends of mine would like to join me on a project.  TFS is great, but it looks like it will cost around $500 / person in order to use TFS for a closed-source personal project.  This is unacceptable.  I spent a little time (and let me emphasize that "little") looking for another solution.  There are fragmented solutions that are free, but their quality does not impress me.  Where is the amazing end-to-end project management / source control / build automation tool that is free for non-commercial, small projects?

I do not understand the business of this.  Give the tools away for free for the little projects so that we are all hooked on them for the big projects.  As is, those that tend to drive the decisions are pushed into familiarity with the free tools and we end up using eclipse and subversion for C++ professional ventures when the tools are clearly inferior.

The number one rule for creating addicts:  the first taste is free.

And it can't be a trimmed down taste.  It needs to be the real thing.  Don't worry.  We'll come back with cash.


Rant Caveat:  Solutions need to provide something like Team Pulse with TFS integration.  There are free editions of some nice tools, but the free version always falls short.