6 ms·

So what's the closed sourced about? I would hazard it's about Amazon or Microsoft not forking the product for their eco-systems? Which prompts lock-in, but I gu

So what's the closed sourced about? I would hazard it's about Amazon or Microsoft not forking the product for their eco-systems? Which prompts lock-in, but I guess that's fine as Google is not the clear winner in this fight.

DannyBee 7y ago
I'd turn it around: What does open sourcing it buy them? The number of community contributions/involvement in this type of thing is small (in most cases), it also requires a lot of work upfront to integrate well with the OSS community (or you just end up pissing people off), and in practice you want to control the experience and product direction anyway (since it is part of your baseline experience for your platform), so you just piss off the community. What is the net positive? Not just for Google, but for anyone? I don't think it's about lock in so much as no perceivable benefit for trying to get this particular thing off the ground ATM. I don't think anyone is going to succeed with locking someone in with IDE plugins, and i don't think anyone is trying (even MS). (I'll make the disclaimer that i actually could have changed this decision but chose not to and i'm even a card carrying member of the FSF)
- ljm 7y ago
  Would that not also suggest poor leadership/stewardship? Open sourcing something shouldn't suddenly mean that a community turns up and takes over the project with unreasonable or out-of-scope demands. You can be open source without requesting contributions or building a tribe around it. You can be open source and say no to things you don't like: go ahead and fork and adapt it to your own needs.
  - DannyBee 7y ago
    No. It suggests open source is simply non-trivial to get right and requires a lot of time and effort that isn't always well spent doing that when you first start out. Time you spend on that is time you spend not on your product. I would strongly suggest you choose one or the other (IE either do a good job of it or don't do it at all). I also think you are vastly oversimplifying this. You also seem to have an interesting view of what happens when you open source stuff that is not at all consistent with what i've seen over the past 20+ years across a variety of projects. But YMMV, of course.
- int_19h 7y ago
  The most obvious benefit would be adding similar functionality to other IDEs. But really, why assume that you can guess what the benefit would be? Open the code and let the community decide what it can do with it. It doesn't have to come together with an open development process, necessarily. Some other generic benefits that would apply here are the ability to debug issues, and interop/compatibility. The first one is often dismissed on the grounds that most users are unable to do this; but we're talking about dev tooling here, where the target audience has the necessary skills. From my own experience working on open source dev tools, this is probably the biggest benefit - not PRs, but detailed bug reports that already mostly narrow down the problem. In cases where the original bug can be very environment-specific or otherwise hard to repro, this can make the difference between resolved and closed as no-repro. Interop/compatibility is also an important angle, and very hard to predict in advance. But any extension that interacts with this one, or is used by it, could potentially benefit. This also ties into the ability to debug it somewhat - if extension A breaks extension B, it's much easier for the author of A to figure out why, exactly, and what's the best way to avoid it, if they have the source for B. Then there's the ethical angle. VSCode itself is open source. So far as I know, all extensions that this one relies on to enable various customer scenarios - e.g. IDE support for various GCP-supported languages - are open source. For something that derives a substantial (arguably, the majority) of its value from those, closing the source runs counter to the spirit of the whole thing, regardless of the license terms. I can understand doing so for some specific business reasons - e.g. use of some proprietary components, or trade secrets in the code - but if it's only a question of not wanting to make the extra effort, it's kinda disrespectful towards people who did make that effort. Even that would be understandable if we were talking about a non-profit project that has limited resources and has to ration them. But this is Google, and the product itself is a part of the subscription-driven GCP ecosystem. In general, the reason why open source is so widespread today is because for-profit corporations subsidize a lot of it. They have their own non-altruistic reasons, of course, but the entire arrangement is beneficial to all. So it's a commons, and we should all strive to maintain it and the cultural norms that make it sustainable. (Full disclosure: I am a developer working on one of the relevant Microsoft VSCode extensions. Everything I write here is strictly my personal opinion. I do not speak in any official capacity.)
  - 7y ago
swebs 7y ago
Hiding how much it tracks you, most likely.
- skybrian 7y ago
  No, quite unlikely. You can't hide network traffic (or much of anything else) just by compiling your JavaScript with Closure Compiler and Google engineers know this. Looks like there is a config setting for this: "cloudcode.enableTelemetry".

DannyBee 7y ago

I'd turn it around: What does open sourcing it buy them? The number of community contributions/involvement in this type of thing is small (in most cases), it also requires a lot of work upfront to integrate well with the OSS community (or you just end up pissing people off), and in practice you want to control the experience and product direction anyway (since it is part of your baseline experience for your platform), so you just piss off the community. What is the net positive? Not just for Google, but for anyone? I don't think it's about lock in so much as no perceivable benefit for trying to get this particular thing off the ground ATM. I don't think anyone is going to succeed with locking someone in with IDE plugins, and i don't think anyone is trying (even MS). (I'll make the disclaimer that i actually could have changed this decision but chose not to and i'm even a card carrying member of the FSF)

ljm 7y ago
Would that not also suggest poor leadership/stewardship? Open sourcing something shouldn't suddenly mean that a community turns up and takes over the project with unreasonable or out-of-scope demands. You can be open source without requesting contributions or building a tribe around it. You can be open source and say no to things you don't like: go ahead and fork and adapt it to your own needs.
- DannyBee 7y ago
  No. It suggests open source is simply non-trivial to get right and requires a lot of time and effort that isn't always well spent doing that when you first start out. Time you spend on that is time you spend not on your product. I would strongly suggest you choose one or the other (IE either do a good job of it or don't do it at all). I also think you are vastly oversimplifying this. You also seem to have an interesting view of what happens when you open source stuff that is not at all consistent with what i've seen over the past 20+ years across a variety of projects. But YMMV, of course.
int_19h 7y ago
The most obvious benefit would be adding similar functionality to other IDEs. But really, why assume that you can guess what the benefit would be? Open the code and let the community decide what it can do with it. It doesn't have to come together with an open development process, necessarily. Some other generic benefits that would apply here are the ability to debug issues, and interop/compatibility. The first one is often dismissed on the grounds that most users are unable to do this; but we're talking about dev tooling here, where the target audience has the necessary skills. From my own experience working on open source dev tools, this is probably the biggest benefit - not PRs, but detailed bug reports that already mostly narrow down the problem. In cases where the original bug can be very environment-specific or otherwise hard to repro, this can make the difference between resolved and closed as no-repro. Interop/compatibility is also an important angle, and very hard to predict in advance. But any extension that interacts with this one, or is used by it, could potentially benefit. This also ties into the ability to debug it somewhat - if extension A breaks extension B, it's much easier for the author of A to figure out why, exactly, and what's the best way to avoid it, if they have the source for B. Then there's the ethical angle. VSCode itself is open source. So far as I know, all extensions that this one relies on to enable various customer scenarios - e.g. IDE support for various GCP-supported languages - are open source. For something that derives a substantial (arguably, the majority) of its value from those, closing the source runs counter to the spirit of the whole thing, regardless of the license terms. I can understand doing so for some specific business reasons - e.g. use of some proprietary components, or trade secrets in the code - but if it's only a question of not wanting to make the extra effort, it's kinda disrespectful towards people who did make that effort. Even that would be understandable if we were talking about a non-profit project that has limited resources and has to ration them. But this is Google, and the product itself is a part of the subscription-driven GCP ecosystem. In general, the reason why open source is so widespread today is because for-profit corporations subsidize a lot of it. They have their own non-altruistic reasons, of course, but the entire arrangement is beneficial to all. So it's a commons, and we should all strive to maintain it and the cultural norms that make it sustainable. (Full disclosure: I am a developer working on one of the relevant Microsoft VSCode extensions. Everything I write here is strictly my personal opinion. I do not speak in any official capacity.)
- 7y ago

swebs 7y ago

Hiding how much it tracks you, most likely.

skybrian 7y ago
No, quite unlikely. You can't hide network traffic (or much of anything else) just by compiling your JavaScript with Closure Compiler and Google engineers know this. Looks like there is a config setting for this: "cloudcode.enableTelemetry".