Most commercial software vendors have similar programs and analogous offers available to developers, and seemingly most featuring the "for development and testing purposes" restrictions.
If you're operating within the particular vendor's realm and particularly developing over a longer horizon, these programs can be reasonable.
But these programs are also sticky-traps or "free samples" leading to addictions or vendor lock-ins or whatever analogy you'd prefer. (Which is why they exist; duh.) Once entrenched on (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, EC2/S3, hosted services, whatever) porting out or switching from development to production use can get costly.
Looking forward, consider if the end-users are even particularly going to know or care what software is running under the hood in a few years. While it's a now very successful model, what are the growth trends in three or five years? Between hosting (Azure or slices or otherwise) and virtual machine guests and embedded clients, the operating system and the bag of drivers that it provides is becoming a component of your application, or something you (or somebody else) runs for your customers.
Pick your bag of drivers and choose your particular software addiction(s) appropriately. If that's BizSpark, go for it. Just don't get dazzled by the word "FREE!" from any vendor.
Most commercial software vendors have similar programs and analogous offers available to developers, and seemingly most featuring the "for development and testing purposes" restrictions.
If you're operating within the particular vendor's realm and particularly developing over a longer horizon, these programs can be reasonable.
But these programs are also sticky-traps or "free samples" leading to addictions or vendor lock-ins or whatever analogy you'd prefer. (Which is why they exist; duh.) Once entrenched on (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, EC2/S3, hosted services, whatever) porting out or switching from development to production use can get costly.
Looking forward, consider if the end-users are even particularly going to know or care what software is running under the hood in a few years. While it's a now very successful model, what are the growth trends in three or five years? Between hosting (Azure or slices or otherwise) and virtual machine guests and embedded clients, the operating system and the bag of drivers that it provides is becoming a component of your application, or something you (or somebody else) runs for your customers.
Pick your bag of drivers and choose your particular software addiction(s) appropriately. If that's BizSpark, go for it. Just don't get dazzled by the word "FREE!" from any vendor.