Re: Oh the irony...
Factual inaccuracies here. First, you can buy Visual Studio Professional without a subscription of any kind, and there's no suggestion that this will be any different for VS2014. Admittedly, yes, you can only get VS Test Pro or VS Ultimate with a subscription, but at that pricing level it's going to be your company buying for you. Most developers outside large teams don't need those features.
Second, most of the products licensed to your under the MSDN subscription are licensed for perpetual use. Which is to say, you can carry on using them - and VS itself - after your subscription has ended.
And if you do buy a subscription then you get the new stuff, including OSes, SQL Server and VS2014 when it comes out, at no additional cost.
Seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
