6 ms·
The Visual Studio Code thing is kind of a shame. It seems like a variant of "embrace, extend, extinguish" inasmuch as things like Atom exist (which microsoft al
by theonemind 5y ago
The Visual Studio Code thing is kind of a shame. It seems like a variant of "embrace, extend, extinguish" inasmuch as things like Atom exist (which microsoft also owns, womp womp, but didn't for 3 years after Atom started). It competes in the space, keeps competitors weak by being the best so that it gets all of the users and mind-share and resources, but doesn't go all of the way with them because it could compete with their proprietary products...so while being the best is a good thing, it's not a good thing when it creates a monopoly-like product in a space good enough to suck up landscape resources so that no viable competitors not under Microsoft's thumb could ever start approaching parity with their proprietary products.
Definitely dents Microsoft's nascent open-source credit with me and, like so much of Microsoft's history, seems actively damaging in a monumental way to the history of computing itself for Microsoft's benefit.
- simooooo 5y ago“keeps competitors weak by being the best” What
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ognarb 5y agoVisual Studio Code has also some official extensions that are not open source and the official build contains a few proprietary features by default. The only thing I like with Visual Studio Code is that they were able to promote a cross text editor way to have auto-completion and other IDE-like features, thanks to the Language Server Protocol. Now I can use these features in Vim and Kate.
- jcelerier 5y ago> Visual Studio Code has also some official extensions that are not open source and the official build contains a few proprietary features by default. I don't understand how that is remotely ok. VSCode's main binary links statically against Blink (as it uses Electron) which is under LGPL, at the very minimum they should provide a way to relink that binary as per LGPL requirements.
- erk__ 5y agoI don't think there s a static linking going on there, else it would be impossible to use Electron for closed source software. Though it is used for things like Discord.
- jcelerier 5y ago> I don't think there s a static linking going on there, else it would be impossible to use Electron for closed source software. no, the closed source part can stay closed source but relinking against a custom version of Blink must be allowed. Just run "strings" on the code binary: you'll see symbols coming straight from Blink like this one: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/72ceeed2ebcd505b8d8205ed7354e862b871995e/third_party/blink/renderer/core/html/forms/html_form_controls_collection.cc https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/72ceeed2ebcd505b8d... $ strings code-insiders | grep HTMLFormControls HTMLFormControlsCollection
- nitrogen 5y agoAre those symbols defined in that file, or is that an import reference from a library? What does (your platform's equivalent of) nm or ldd say?
- jcelerier 5y agoit only links against basic Linux / X11 / GTK stuff (and, I mean, at 123 megabytes, there's not much doubt that there's chromium inside that binary) $ objdump -p /opt/visual-studio-code-insiders/code-insiders | grep NEEDED NEEDED libffmpeg.so NEEDED libdl.so.2 NEEDED libpthread.so.0 NEEDED librt.so.1 NEEDED libgobject-2.0.so.0 NEEDED libglib-2.0.so.0 NEEDED libxshmfence.so.1 NEEDED libgio-2.0.so.0 NEEDED libnss3.so NEEDED libnssutil3.so NEEDED libsmime3.so NEEDED libnspr4.so NEEDED libatk-1.0.so.0 NEEDED libatk-bridge-2.0.so.0 NEEDED libdbus-1.so.3 NEEDED libdrm.so.2 NEEDED libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 NEEDED libgtk-3.so.0 NEEDED libgdk-3.so.0 NEEDED libpango-1.0.so.0 NEEDED libcairo.so.2 NEEDED libm.so.6 NEEDED libX11.so.6 NEEDED libXcomposite.so.1 NEEDED libXdamage.so.1 NEEDED libXext.so.6 NEEDED libXfixes.so.3 NEEDED libXrandr.so.2 NEEDED libexpat.so.1 NEEDED libxcb.so.1 NEEDED libxkbcommon.so.0 NEEDED libgbm.so.1 NEEDED libasound.so.2 NEEDED libatspi.so.0 NEEDED libgcc_s.so.1 NEEDED libc.so.6 NEEDED ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
- TAForObvReasons 5y agoVSCodium is a build that does not include any of the proprietary bits: https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
- rychco 5y agoUnfortunately there are extensions & features that (last I checked) only work in VSCode but not VSCodium. 'Remote Development' extension was the one I found out was apparently closed source.
- johannes1234321 5y agoThat one is based on "proper" VisualStudio's remote development features, so it originated from a closed source product. Having observed that multiple times, I assume that open sourcing it is a major effort as this probably includes some third party code or patent licenses or something which prevent open sourcing. At least I don't see the business case Microsoft would play there in keeping it closed but freely available. But who knows. And: That aside the role Microsoft nowadays plays in the open source world is reason for concern, while their current actions are mostly positive.
- hackerfromthefu 5y agoThe business case is a combination of Discretionary Pricing, and Moat - those are the business school names for the strategies you can look up if you like.. The Discretionary pricing comes in the Tiers, while the Moat is provided by VS Code reducing the chance of real competition against Tier 1 or 2. The removal of hot reload from VS Code is to provide differentiation between Tier 2 & 3, to drive customers to paid versions. -- Tier 1 .. Visual Studio Enterprise - expensive Tier 2 .. Visual Studio - low medium cost for a business Tier 3 .. Visual Studio Code - 'free' in exchange for your info (via telemetry) and reduces the chance of a truly open competitor challenging the above tiers. This one must walk a line between being less useful than above tiers so there's value to buy them, while being more useful than other 'free' competition in the short term so they attract mindshare away from other OSS that might otherwise grow to challenge the higher Tiers
- pizza234 5y agoVSC being marketed as open source is certainly a grey area (there are arguments both in favor and against), but it's not a bad situation as it seems. IntelliJ IDEA is a competitive "open source based" product, with a significant market share (which qualifies as "viable competitor not under Microsoft's thumb"). VSC's "base open source" product is actually equally or more capable than IDEA - see VSCodium; its existence is proof that in worst-case scenario, a capable open source editor would still exist. Although there are some omissions, I think that given the MIT license, in theory a competitor could also build a series of commercial plugins - if I'm correct, this would actually be an interesting scenario.
- rStar 5y agogates, ballmer, allen, nadella etcetera etcetera microsoft lives in the grey area. i’m pretty sure epsteins plane was grey. pretty sure they were all good buds.
- smarx007 5y agoI definitely had a good laugh at "keeps competitors weak by being the best"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AlexandrB 5y agoI think the idea here is "dumping". By subsidizing a free, best-in-class editor Microsoft prevents any competing paid options from gaining a foothold. This is not too different from their old strategy with IE.
- xxpor 5y agoMaking a paid product for something that's a choice of the individual user is a non-starter these days. What I mean by that is something without network effects. If your company uses Google Docs, you don't have much choice because that's where everything is (modulo apps that can sync to it so you can use a different editor). For something like VSCode, at the end of the day it's still just a text editor. My use of VSCode doesn't stop my teammate from using vim. For something like that, do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is at most companies to get them to buy something? The issue isn't even if it's $5 or $500. It's just going through the process of figuring out how to buy something, getting approvals, figuring out how to deal with the invoice, etc. Unless I'm already super committed to it, there's no chance when I can simply download any number of free options out there.
- nrook 5y agoEven if it's explicit policy at a company that employees can expense a text editor or IDE, a large proportion of people will still never bother. I saw the "Please buy Sublime Text!" pop-up all the time at my last job, and that was at a small startup where everyone knew the company was happy to pay for it.
- smarx007 5y agoI understand what you mean, of course. I am not sure if anti-dumping was ever applied to products given away for free with zero unit cost economics. If applied incorrectly, Apple and Microsoft could argue that Linux and Linux-based OSes being free is illegal!
- CyanLite4 5y agoJust pay the $13 a month for a premium license and get over it already.
- etothepii 5y agoWhat is this reference to?
- GekkePrutser 5y ago> keeps competitors weak by being the best Not "the best" per se.. Rather "good enough" and part of other tools the customers already use, while keeping them free so it becomes a matter of having to spend extra $$$ for another product. Take Teams for example. It's a pig of an app IMO. Slow (takes almost a minute to start on my otherwise-fast M1 Mac), extremely high memory use, constant errors "Oops something went wrong + cute pic of ice cream", a mess visually and not dense enough UI. They focus all their time on adding new features rather than optimising. They also focus very strongly on the "for everyone", trying to be a jack of all trades, master of none. Slack does a much better job at team collaboration IMO. Especially for tech users, it's fast, shows a lot in small screen space and isn't as heavy (though I really miss the IRC bridge!). But Teams comes for free with O365 and integrates fully with that ecosystem. So no hassle with integrating with your ID Provider etc, it's just plug and play. So if you'd want to have slack at work you'd have to make an unreasonably strong business case for all the extra cost and work. Another example: Sharepoint. I doubt you could find anyone who would consider Sharepoint best at anything. Yet it's still used heavily in favour of other options, because it's again free if you're already in the MS ecosystem, and it integrates with all the other tools like OneDrive and Teams (both basically just layers on top of Sharepoint). So even if you're not using sharepoint, you're using sharepoint :P I do agree they are the best at the VS Code niche. But usually this is not their game, they go for 'good enough'. Maybe it's because their developers dogfood VS Code so they couldn't stand it being slow :) For example, VS Code is highly optimised and doesn't suffer the performance drawbacks that usually come with electron. They have optimised the hell out of it. However they never bothered to do the same with Teams, probably because they own that space anyway.
- skohan 5y agoYeah when I think of MS products, they're never the best. They're usually just good enough, and then adoption is driven by some sort of leverage.
- nickpeterson 5y agoIt’s tricky though, because they will compete hard on some things if they sense it’s vital. Look at SQL Server, 2005 was probably the most improvement I have ever seen in a single ms release. But once they establish a lead they crank down the dial and cruise.
- pjmlp 5y agoVisual Studio Code was the baby from Erich Gamma, being yet another take on IDEs after his experience on Visual Age and Eclipse, actually. Here is his keynote at VSCode day, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hilznKQij7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hilznKQij7A