While it is indeed free, it comes with online activation and needs to be tied to a Live account (or whatever it's called these days) after the first 30 days. This is a pretty stupid decision IMO, as I discovered a few weeks back on a non-internet-connected dev server.

And I say that as a longtime VS fan and advocate!

(Of course, I guess JetBrains products would suffer exactly the same problem now with the new SaaS model - I just needed a rant about this particular issue.)