6 ms·

Personally, I wouldn't actually care if Visual Studio Code was completely proprietary with zero open source element. I think the imagined consequences tend to

Personally, I wouldn't actually care if Visual Studio Code was completely proprietary with zero open source element. I think the imagined consequences tend to mostly be not that significant for the vast majority of people, at most it would be a blip in the timeline as people switch to something else. The actual consequence (as implied by this article) seems to be people who build their business around these tools, they are entering a particular ecosystem backed by a large corporate and they are leveraging on the big corporates ability to make that ecosystem popular. That kind of is what it is. Pros and Cons.

isodev 4y ago
The consequences for the majority are such that, over time, leading language ecosystems become tied to Microsoft services. One example in the article is the availability of alternative editors and IDEs decreasing over time in favor of extensions to VSCode. Essentially, we are driving towards a monoculture - either you are using VSCode and adjacent services, or you choose an alternative, pay the price of compatibility, and experience paper cuts.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > leading language ecosystems become tied to Microsoft services until a free alternative is developed. Making a freely-licensed language plugin is not inherently hard, it's just a lot of work. You're paying for convenience.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  On the other hand, we now have LSP.
  - oaiey 4y ago
    Their strategy is a mixed bag. They want to maintain that in an open source way but they work very hard that their experience is the best so they can capitalize on that. Not a new playbook.
  - oakpond 4y ago
    Is it really "on the other hand"? LSP has paved the way for 'hybrid-source' (part closed part open) IDEs. Technically you can close down all the good parts of the IDE and open-source the bare minimum client-side functionality.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      I guess, but LSP has been a huge boon to every single code editor that isn't already developed by a for-profit company. "Hybrid-source" has already existed in pretty much every plugin ecosystem for a closed-source product ever (e.g. JetBrains, Sublime Text, Google Chrome, et multa alia) other than the Microsoft Office suite (where people sell proprietary plugins for $50). > close down all the good parts of the IDE and open-source the bare minimum client-side functionality. This is still a material improvement over closing down all the good parts of the IDE and not open-sourcing the bare minimum client-side functionality! The hardest part by far is the "bare minimum", turning the NxM problem into an N+M problem. That was always the original selling point of LSP. And language servers (even and including the source-available ones developed by Microsoft) tend to be a lot more than "bare minimum" anyway. So Pylance (whatever that actually is) is closed-source, but Pyright and Debugpy are excellent tools and are open-source. Yes, Microsoft has made a good strategic maneuver here. Their obvious ploy is to garner general goodwill, launder their well-deserved filthy reputation, and establish themselves as the go-to company for software developer tooling, which will hopefully translate into juicy enterprise sales as well as lots of telemetry and platform lock-in for later value extraction, not to mention free bugtesting & developer contributions from the public. But let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Don't forget that they are investing heavily in something that benefits the entire ecosystem. By open-sourcing the most important core elements, they have left the door open for people to fork and redistribute their software if and when they try to go for an EEE maneuver. The only thing that makes me a little squeamish about LSP is that the protocol itself is controlled by Microsoft and I guess also Sourcegraph. But even then, the community can easily tell Microsoft to go fuck themselves if they try to pull off something like what Google is doing with its Manifest v3.
brundolf 4y ago
> The actual consequence (as implied by this article) seems to be people who build their business around these tools But there aren't really even consequences for those. The core editor really is free to use however you want; you can use the auxiliary bits which are proprietary, or you can not use them and fill the gaps yourself. That's up to you.

isodev 4y ago

The consequences for the majority are such that, over time, leading language ecosystems become tied to Microsoft services. One example in the article is the availability of alternative editors and IDEs decreasing over time in favor of extensions to VSCode. Essentially, we are driving towards a monoculture - either you are using VSCode and adjacent services, or you choose an alternative, pay the price of compatibility, and experience paper cuts.

zozbot234 4y ago
> leading language ecosystems become tied to Microsoft services until a free alternative is developed. Making a freely-licensed language plugin is not inherently hard, it's just a lot of work. You're paying for convenience.
nerdponx 4y ago
On the other hand, we now have LSP.
- oaiey 4y ago
  Their strategy is a mixed bag. They want to maintain that in an open source way but they work very hard that their experience is the best so they can capitalize on that. Not a new playbook.
- oakpond 4y ago
  Is it really "on the other hand"? LSP has paved the way for 'hybrid-source' (part closed part open) IDEs. Technically you can close down all the good parts of the IDE and open-source the bare minimum client-side functionality.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    I guess, but LSP has been a huge boon to every single code editor that isn't already developed by a for-profit company. "Hybrid-source" has already existed in pretty much every plugin ecosystem for a closed-source product ever (e.g. JetBrains, Sublime Text, Google Chrome, et multa alia) other than the Microsoft Office suite (where people sell proprietary plugins for $50). > close down all the good parts of the IDE and open-source the bare minimum client-side functionality. This is still a material improvement over closing down all the good parts of the IDE and not open-sourcing the bare minimum client-side functionality! The hardest part by far is the "bare minimum", turning the NxM problem into an N+M problem. That was always the original selling point of LSP. And language servers (even and including the source-available ones developed by Microsoft) tend to be a lot more than "bare minimum" anyway. So Pylance (whatever that actually is) is closed-source, but Pyright and Debugpy are excellent tools and are open-source. Yes, Microsoft has made a good strategic maneuver here. Their obvious ploy is to garner general goodwill, launder their well-deserved filthy reputation, and establish themselves as the go-to company for software developer tooling, which will hopefully translate into juicy enterprise sales as well as lots of telemetry and platform lock-in for later value extraction, not to mention free bugtesting & developer contributions from the public. But let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Don't forget that they are investing heavily in something that benefits the entire ecosystem. By open-sourcing the most important core elements, they have left the door open for people to fork and redistribute their software if and when they try to go for an EEE maneuver. The only thing that makes me a little squeamish about LSP is that the protocol itself is controlled by Microsoft and I guess also Sourcegraph. But even then, the community can easily tell Microsoft to go fuck themselves if they try to pull off something like what Google is doing with its Manifest v3.

brundolf 4y ago

> The actual consequence (as implied by this article) seems to be people who build their business around these tools But there aren't really even consequences for those. The core editor really is free to use however you want; you can use the auxiliary bits which are proprietary, or you can not use them and fill the gaps yourself. That's up to you.