This is a little hard to believe so I read it twice and yes it's true, Microsoft is giving away development tools for production use to software startups.

I'm packing up to head off to the DevConnections conference in a few hours so I'll have to keep this short.

BizSpark is a new program from Microsoft that enables software startups (in business less than 3 years and revenues of less than $1million (I always laugh at this type of definintion of small business)) to get their hands on an MSDN Subscription, other software and mentoring for...free. However the MSDN subscription has a twist which is that you can use the tools in production.

It also looks like the bar to entry is pretty low, though I could be missing something (always the skeptic) as it still sounds a little too good to be true.

Check it out yourself in case you think I've been smoking something... at microsoft.com/bizspark.