Brian Harry announced some upcoming changes in licensing of Visual Studio Online (and later for Team Foundation Server too). Everybody should be delighted by the new Stakeholder license, which will be completely free. It will have following permissions:

• Full read/write/create on all work items
• Create, run and save (to “My Queries”) work item queries
• View project and team home pages
• Access to the backlog, including add and update (but no ability to reprioritize the work)
• Ability to receive work item alerts

That’s a lot of things that people can do without any cost, isn’t it? Now everybody will be able to participate in a VS Online / TFS project without any special licensing requirements.