Microstrategy Desktop becomes completely free - What does it mean?

Recently Microstrategy has announced that it's Desktop tool becomes completely free for everyone. While the desktop tool is not totally new, many of the existing users are confused after the announcement came. So the questions are like -

• Is it really free for ever? 
• Is it fully functional?
• What are the limitations?
• What should I do as an existing licensed user?
• Why it's free at the first place?

Yes it's free forever and for everyone without any restrictions. It's fully functional and a great tool.

As far as limitations compared to MSTR WEB;

Going on the assumption that the desktop user is not a licensed MSTR Web user:

1. They do not have access to any MSTR web objects like existing reports as data sources

2. The security model is not available so row level security is not there.

3. Direct Access to managed data sets. Every user will need to manage their own data set. in WEB all of the connection information that I will typically use(database connections) are managed by the Administrator.  so If I want to connect to a DB2 database that is not part of the prescribed list of databases. That connection is already managed by the administrator. VLDB setting are also managed by the Administrators so I know unsupported databases can still be optimized .  if I had to do it in desktop, connecting to a version of an unsupported database is not easy.

So if you are ok with these things you can always use the desktop instead of web. There are number of advantages if you work on desktop if it suits your needs.

And why it's free? It's simply to tackle the competition. All other newer players have introduced similar applications for free.