8 ms·

Forgive the kneejerk reaction but it sounds like we've come full circle back to closed source IDEs. For what reason are any of those extensions closed source? W

Forgive the kneejerk reaction but it sounds like we've come full circle back to closed source IDEs. For what reason are any of those extensions closed source? Why are people using and championing tools with closed source extensions that check what they're running on (in order to force you to use/buy the original thing) in 2020? You can pry emacs/vim from my cold dead hands -- Microsoft is trying (and succeeding) in google-chrome-ing it's way into the productive developer space. If that's true, I wonder what the Firefox in this analogy is? Atom? Emacs/Vim?

statictype 6y ago
One possible reason is for security/abuse? I assume these extensions require communicating with some central server (owned by Microsoft) to exchange information with peers at some point during its use. Allowing the extension to run in contexts outside of VS Code could be an issue for them?
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  > One possible reason is for security/abuse? > I assume these extensions require communicating with some central server (owned by Microsoft) to exchange information with peers at some point during its use. So I'm no WSL expert but why would Windows Subsystem for Linux or SSH need to communicate with some central server? Also unless they're doing some obfuscation, you're going to see those URLs in the binary to start with, no? Or you just... watch where it calls out to? > Allowing the extension to run in contexts outside of VS Code could be an issue for them? How? If it's a warranty issue then they should just issue the right statements in the license and make sure no one is under the impression that there's a warranty attached? I tried to think of some too but security doesn't pass my admittedly simple sniff test.
bmitc 6y ago
Why does it matter? The remote extensions for WSL and SSH in Visual Studio Code are extremely useful and actually work. Why should we care if they are closed source or not?
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  Because if it breaks, you can't fix it. If it reports on you, you won't know. If it decides to not allow SSHing into a server that it has blacklisted, you can't change it. I'm having trouble with the question, it sounds like it's equivalent to "why bother open sourcing useful, currently-working software X", and that's just the "why is open source good" question, right? I can somewhat understand WSL being closed source -- maybe it's got some proprietary MS stuff in there that is legally restricted, or they just don't want people using the interfaces they used? But tools like SSH grow because they're open source, not because they're closed, seems somewhat misplaced there.
  - chii 6y ago
    I would be OK with WSL being close-sourced, as long as the interface (including programmatic interfaces) to which you interact with it are open and documented. Vendor lock-in is what i would see as bad-faith actor's action. A product being good should be the only lock-in required.
  - tasubotadas 6y ago
    How is that worse than not having the extension at all?
    - Nullabillity 6y ago
      People don't tend to build workflows around stuff that doesn't exist.
  - mekster 6y ago
    > Because if it breaks, you can't fix it. If it reports on you, you won't know. If it decides to not allow SSHing into a server that it has blacklisted, you can't change it. Are these the only reasons you have problem with it being closed source? I'll happily use the closed source version when MS is developing who can handle 4 digit number of issues and likely to fix issues you care about and more. If someone black lists your SSH server publicly, you seem to have a bigger problem than an extension being closed source.
pedrogpimenta 6y ago
Atom is also a property of Microsoft.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  Right... because they bought Github. I guess we can gauge how much embrace+extend+extinguish MS is doing by whether Atom gets winded down or goes into maintenance mode. I know it's not as popular as VSCode is now, and development has slowed since it burst onto the scene, but if anyone at Github actively works on Atom maybe those people should be worried about being reassigned.
  - blackoil 6y ago
    How is in anyway linked to EEE?
    - hardwaresofton 6y ago
      Am I totally misunderstanding what EEE[0] meant? > "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors. > Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard. > Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard. > Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions. Embrace: MS enters the lightweight editor (Atom) space with VSCode Extend: MS extends VSCode with proprietary WSL/SSH/whatever code that they use their deep pockets to maintain and push people to VSCode ("it works better with WSL") Extinguish: VSCode becomes the defacto standard. It remains to be seen whether Atom will be affected by this in actuality but it's already been supplanted in popular marketing IMO. VSCode is already more popular than Atom AFAIK. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...
legulere 6y ago
The Linux Kernel started the shenanigans offering some features only if you choose the right license.
nightowl_games 6y ago
Sublime Text is the Firefox to VSCode's Chrome.
- commoner 6y ago
  Perhaps if it were open source. Sublime Text is closed source, so it's more like Safari, Opera, or Vivaldi.
ohthehugemanate 6y ago
See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/faq#_why-arent-the-remote-development-extensions-or-their-components-open-source https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/faq#_why-arent-the... I love that post, because it encapsulates exactly the kind of internal logic that traps not-fully-open organizations. MS can't open source the remote Dev extensions, because the service that runs it (and much of the client code) comes from other, proprietary offerings and codebases. More concretely, they come from other teams that aren't used to open source, are discouraged from getting used to it, and/or don't have approval from legal to release code in the open. This is not an EEE trap, this is normal bureaucracy for an organization the size of MS. Consider that for almost all of VSCode's lifetime, the OSS version has been perfectly full featured, only missing telemetry and copyrighted brand marks. Remote Dev extensions are less than a year old. They have the same problem with the C# debugger: owned by a proprietary team, can't get permission to open source it. It is extremely hard to open source "some" or "most" of your code, especially in a company whose USP is tight integration between pieces. The legal quagmires are horrendous. A tool that crosses so many lines, like an integrated IDE, are backed into positions like this. Disclosure: I work for Microsoft in a totally unrelated department. Also, fwiw i'm a lifetime vim devotee... used it as my primary IDE for a long time and still use it daily. But vscode won me over exactly with the remote code extensions. Now it's the only proprietary software on my toolchain (apart from my BIOS).
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  As a user it's still the same EEE trap, regardless of whether it comes from outright malice or is disguised as incompetence.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  I agree, it is a huge pain to convince anyone in almost any company to open source anything. All they see are tenuous legal risks and extra work.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  I assume that it depends on old code. With old code opensourcing can be really tough. One reason of course is "embarrassment" as it's "ugly" code and you want to run a full review and audit and eventually cover private APIs from other modules. That's however solvable. More complicated is another reason: Legacy software often contains code contributed by contractors and acquired from external vendors, where there is no license for making it open source. Sometimes such third party code is even deeply webbed in and legal review is a pain as you have to figure out the origin of essentially each line of code. This can be a lot of work. I observed how Sun did this with Solaris and over multiple years managed to bring it down to a handful libs with third party code (some internationalisation thing comes to mind, meanwhile replaced in the illumnos sphere)
gameswithgo 6y ago
plenty of us don’t care at all if our editor is closed source or not.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  I agree, and this is why I'm glad people like RMS exist, even if he is difficult/off his rocker/whatever else -- the free software movement and the ideas it espouses would almost surely have not made it this far (and benefited all of us) without people who cared so much to tip the scale.

statictype 6y ago

One possible reason is for security/abuse? I assume these extensions require communicating with some central server (owned by Microsoft) to exchange information with peers at some point during its use. Allowing the extension to run in contexts outside of VS Code could be an issue for them?

hardwaresofton 6y ago
> One possible reason is for security/abuse? > I assume these extensions require communicating with some central server (owned by Microsoft) to exchange information with peers at some point during its use. So I'm no WSL expert but why would Windows Subsystem for Linux or SSH need to communicate with some central server? Also unless they're doing some obfuscation, you're going to see those URLs in the binary to start with, no? Or you just... watch where it calls out to? > Allowing the extension to run in contexts outside of VS Code could be an issue for them? How? If it's a warranty issue then they should just issue the right statements in the license and make sure no one is under the impression that there's a warranty attached? I tried to think of some too but security doesn't pass my admittedly simple sniff test.

bmitc 6y ago

Why does it matter? The remote extensions for WSL and SSH in Visual Studio Code are extremely useful and actually work. Why should we care if they are closed source or not?

hardwaresofton 6y ago
Because if it breaks, you can't fix it. If it reports on you, you won't know. If it decides to not allow SSHing into a server that it has blacklisted, you can't change it. I'm having trouble with the question, it sounds like it's equivalent to "why bother open sourcing useful, currently-working software X", and that's just the "why is open source good" question, right? I can somewhat understand WSL being closed source -- maybe it's got some proprietary MS stuff in there that is legally restricted, or they just don't want people using the interfaces they used? But tools like SSH grow because they're open source, not because they're closed, seems somewhat misplaced there.
- chii 6y ago
  I would be OK with WSL being close-sourced, as long as the interface (including programmatic interfaces) to which you interact with it are open and documented. Vendor lock-in is what i would see as bad-faith actor's action. A product being good should be the only lock-in required.
- tasubotadas 6y ago
  How is that worse than not having the extension at all?
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    People don't tend to build workflows around stuff that doesn't exist.
- mekster 6y ago
  > Because if it breaks, you can't fix it. If it reports on you, you won't know. If it decides to not allow SSHing into a server that it has blacklisted, you can't change it. Are these the only reasons you have problem with it being closed source? I'll happily use the closed source version when MS is developing who can handle 4 digit number of issues and likely to fix issues you care about and more. If someone black lists your SSH server publicly, you seem to have a bigger problem than an extension being closed source.

pedrogpimenta 6y ago

Atom is also a property of Microsoft.

hardwaresofton 6y ago
Right... because they bought Github. I guess we can gauge how much embrace+extend+extinguish MS is doing by whether Atom gets winded down or goes into maintenance mode. I know it's not as popular as VSCode is now, and development has slowed since it burst onto the scene, but if anyone at Github actively works on Atom maybe those people should be worried about being reassigned.
- blackoil 6y ago
  How is in anyway linked to EEE?
  - hardwaresofton 6y ago
    Am I totally misunderstanding what EEE[0] meant? > "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors. > Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard. > Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard. > Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions. Embrace: MS enters the lightweight editor (Atom) space with VSCode Extend: MS extends VSCode with proprietary WSL/SSH/whatever code that they use their deep pockets to maintain and push people to VSCode ("it works better with WSL") Extinguish: VSCode becomes the defacto standard. It remains to be seen whether Atom will be affected by this in actuality but it's already been supplanted in popular marketing IMO. VSCode is already more popular than Atom AFAIK. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...

legulere 6y ago

The Linux Kernel started the shenanigans offering some features only if you choose the right license.

nightowl_games 6y ago

Sublime Text is the Firefox to VSCode's Chrome.

commoner 6y ago
Perhaps if it were open source. Sublime Text is closed source, so it's more like Safari, Opera, or Vivaldi.

ohthehugemanate 6y ago

See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/faq#_why-arent-the-remote-development-extensions-or-their-components-open-source https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/faq#_why-arent-the... I love that post, because it encapsulates exactly the kind of internal logic that traps not-fully-open organizations. MS can't open source the remote Dev extensions, because the service that runs it (and much of the client code) comes from other, proprietary offerings and codebases. More concretely, they come from other teams that aren't used to open source, are discouraged from getting used to it, and/or don't have approval from legal to release code in the open. This is not an EEE trap, this is normal bureaucracy for an organization the size of MS. Consider that for almost all of VSCode's lifetime, the OSS version has been perfectly full featured, only missing telemetry and copyrighted brand marks. Remote Dev extensions are less than a year old. They have the same problem with the C# debugger: owned by a proprietary team, can't get permission to open source it. It is extremely hard to open source "some" or "most" of your code, especially in a company whose USP is tight integration between pieces. The legal quagmires are horrendous. A tool that crosses so many lines, like an integrated IDE, are backed into positions like this. Disclosure: I work for Microsoft in a totally unrelated department. Also, fwiw i'm a lifetime vim devotee... used it as my primary IDE for a long time and still use it daily. But vscode won me over exactly with the remote code extensions. Now it's the only proprietary software on my toolchain (apart from my BIOS).

Nullabillity 6y ago
As a user it's still the same EEE trap, regardless of whether it comes from outright malice or is disguised as incompetence.
IshKebab 6y ago
I agree, it is a huge pain to convince anyone in almost any company to open source anything. All they see are tenuous legal risks and extra work.
johannes1234321 6y ago
I assume that it depends on old code. With old code opensourcing can be really tough. One reason of course is "embarrassment" as it's "ugly" code and you want to run a full review and audit and eventually cover private APIs from other modules. That's however solvable. More complicated is another reason: Legacy software often contains code contributed by contractors and acquired from external vendors, where there is no license for making it open source. Sometimes such third party code is even deeply webbed in and legal review is a pain as you have to figure out the origin of essentially each line of code. This can be a lot of work. I observed how Sun did this with Solaris and over multiple years managed to bring it down to a handful libs with third party code (some internationalisation thing comes to mind, meanwhile replaced in the illumnos sphere)

gameswithgo 6y ago

plenty of us don’t care at all if our editor is closed source or not.

hardwaresofton 6y ago
I agree, and this is why I'm glad people like RMS exist, even if he is difficult/off his rocker/whatever else -- the free software movement and the ideas it espouses would almost surely have not made it this far (and benefited all of us) without people who cared so much to tip the scale.