4 ms·
> Why say you love open-source if you keep the juicy bits of Visual Studio Code closed-source? More like you love open-source... for making money. I really dis
by johnfn 5y ago
> Why say you love open-source if you keep the juicy bits of Visual Studio Code closed-source? More like you love open-source... for making money.
I really dislike this mindset. Sure, it's disappointing that some pieces of VSCode aren't open-sourced, but man, they open-sourced an entire IDE and plugin ecosystem. That's such a fantastic contribution to the open source community, and yet I see comments like yours that treat it as if it's negligible and somehow want even more? Why is it that, say, Intellij never has to deal with this level of scrutiny? The work MS did even includes a bunch work on existing plugins they don't even own - I know this because my plugin was one which they got their engineers to do a couple months of volunteer work on.
If MS wants to retain a few small pieces of tech to pay the engineers that make a fantastic IDE and ecosystem free and open source for everyone, so be it. You say "making money" as if it's some great evil - how do you think all those open source engineers get paid?
- asddubs 5y agoIntelliJ doesn't pretend to be anything it's not. VSCode does act as a bit of a trojan horse with its proprietary extensions. I do think it's a bit of a smokescreen
- zaphirplane 5y agoIn what way ? Jet brains makes a free open source product and has a paid for product with extra features Ms makes a free open source product with a paid product with more features (thou different code base)
- asddubs 5y agovscode is heavily marketed as open source, not open core. yet key microsoft extensions are closed, as people are often surprised to find out
- DeathArrow 5y agoMake yourself a coffee, get in front of the keyboard and start writing code to replace those extensions.
- asddubs 5y agoI don't use vscode (or IntelliJ)
- jay_kyburz 5y agoThey didn't make VSCode altruistically, they did it to kill a raft of competing text editors that were on the rise. Atom, Sublime Text, etc etc. I think you call it commoditize your complements.
- Zababa 5y agoAlso as a way to promote Typescript, since VSCode has great Typescript support, which is also something by Microsoft.
- merb 5y agowell with the purchase of github they can basically kill atom? and sublime text is/was niche. I have it, but it was still more or less a niche editor.
- tomnipotent 5y agoIt's a business, of course they didn't make it altruistically.
- jesseryoung 5y agoI doubt that Microsoft was looking to get into the "advanced text editor" business. Their biggest money maker is Azure, they made a text editor that promotes Azure.
- skywhopper 5y agoIntelliJ does not have a long history of abusing its monopoly positions to the detriment of its users and developers, nor does it own the biggest default open source code collaboration platform. I think anyone who is not heavily skeptical of Microsoft’s long term intentions here (whether they are explicit goals or just natural outgrowths of being a monopolist) is either shockingly ignorant or willfully naive. Things will get ugly sooner or later, to the dev industry’s detriment. Insisting that one of the biggest tech companies on earth, with a history of abusing its power, go further than smaller companies is not unfair. In order to retain trust, Microsoft needs to put restraints on its own behavior and be open about it.
- lozenge 5y agoIt's becoming less open source now. And they lock away the APIs they use so that you can't reimplement the functionality yourself. Many interesting parts of the Python extension are closed source. AI autocomplete too. Remote development is closed source. What will they pick next? Conditional breakpoints? In-IDE HTML preview?
- DeathArrow 5y ago>Many interesting parts of the Python extension are closed source What stops you or anyone else to reimplement those parts?
- lozenge 5y agoIf you use Proposed APIs you can't publish your extension on the Marketplace and your user needs to run a fork of VS Code, or the nightly build. Either way, your user loses access to the Microsoft closed source extensions which are DRMd to only work with official VS Code build. Like the remote development extensions I mentioned, Pylance, GitHub PR commenting etc. Also, sticking to existing APIs is an inherent disadvantage when Microsoft can add whatever APIs meet their exact needs. Nobody could build Remote Development or Live Share until ms did because the APIs didn't exist.
- premun 5y agoThis. Thousand time this. I will never understand the entitlement of some people. The only explanation at hand is that they probably just don't understand the way the world works?