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Let’s not kid ourselves, most people use Code because it’s free as in free beer, and that’s it. I personally feel lucky that unlike for categories like web sea

Let’s not kid ourselves, most people use Code because it’s free as in free beer, and that’s it. I personally feel lucky that unlike for categories like web search, social networking or mobile messaging, the IDE market features some reasonably-priced paid alternatives of extremely high quality. But many people - including some truly outstanding developers - will continue to use VSCode because they believe that free as in free beer is always better, no matter what. There may be privacy violations, a desecration of FOSS ideals, shady business practices - you name it - and they will continue to use it as long as it’s free and the negative externalities are not too bad. I wouldn’t agree, but I do empathize.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I'm not a developer but I was using Pycharm (community edition, already free) and switched because I found it better for webdev, particularly the plugin ecosystem had useful components. Other apps do to, but I think vscode has gained a lot of development in the ecosystem because of the FOSS dressing it adopted. I think it's it has been closed source, paid for, then it wouldn't have garnered that attention and instead other OS projects would have gained more attention. So I don't think it's fair to say it's just about free-gratis status. Vscode kinda brought me back towards MS, or at least closer to them. Once I'd started using it on Linux (Kubuntu) then trying Win10 again was less of a leap. I've not bought in to the New Friendlier Microsoft, but the hope was growing.