[pstatho]

IMO you should lean towards whatever makes you feel productive. There is nothing more self-motivating than being able to build something even if it's just for yourself. No matter what technology you use, you will come up against hurdles, so how does the documentation and community help out? These are much more important than licensing.

As for licensing MS technology, I highly recommend the Bizspark program. You can register a company for $50 at Registres des Entreprises and that's all you need. You will get free licenses for 3 years that you get to keep plus a whole bunch of Azure discounts. BTW, the licensing of Windows and VS are pretty much negligible in any business. SQL server on the other hand is cost prohibitive, but that is where you can use PostgreSQL.

MS is slowly changing, adopting more and more open source, github, mono. I think they are transforming their business from selling licenses to subscriptions (like Office).