6 ms·

Without proposing a model for how the 50+ full time employees who create VS Code justify their collective ~20MM annual budget, this sounds a lot like: “Ugh, the

Without proposing a model for how the 50+ full time employees who create VS Code justify their collective ~20MM annual budget, this sounds a lot like: “Ugh, they made it mildly inconvenient for my company to benefit from all their engineering work but swap out the product surface and reap the profits by undercutting their product via not needing to fund the engineering ourselves. How lame.”

kragen 2y ago
that's not my problem. my problem is making sure i don't make my own job skills dependent on microsoft's continued goodwill, because historically that has been a guaranteed path to obsolescence. i don't need their engineering work. i have emacs, vim, clang, gcc, idea, eclipse, firefox, and so on i'm only interested in microsoft's generous gift of blankets if they come without smallpox
- dumbo-octopus 2y ago
  You also have vscode. What you don’t have is the various proprietary extensions msft makes to vscode, just as you don’t have every proprietary extension anyone has ever made to those listed platforms.
  - toofy 2y ago
    > You also have vscode. What you don’t have is the various proprietary extensions msft makes… i’m not trying to be confrontational i promise, but i mean, yeah, youre just repeating what we’re discussing… microsoft bangs its drums chanting “please like us again, look at how open source we are. we’re not the same abusive company we used to be… we’ve changed, really.” to many of us, the extension ecosystem is the biggest thing separating code from other IDEs in the first place. this is just more abusive tactics from a company with very very long history of abuse, only this time they try to hide it behind empty “open source community, look how much we love you” rhetoric. i’ve always recommended to organizations to run fast and far from ms products. basically “if you’re looking at a long timescale, you want agility, you want to be able to easily pivot in various other directions. if you use MS, you never know where they’re going to lock you down. run fast and far from them.” and this is just another example of why. i think the commenter above nailed it perfectly with, “they keep telling us we should be grateful for microsoft blankets infected with the smallpox.”
    - dumbo-octopus 2y ago
      Software engineers have to be the most melodramatic lot in existence. Microsoft: you can use this product for your development work freely, but we have licensing in place that prevents redistribution that cuts out our core product offering because let’s be real here this is really expensive to develop and both us and our employees have bills to pay just like anyone else. Internet personalities: the closest thing I might compare this to is the deliberate proliferation of smallpox and the resulting deaths of hundreds of thousands of native americans. (a story which, ironically, turns out to be almost entirely fabricated to spread FUD about the us government… https://allthatsinteresting.com/smallpox-blankets https://allthatsinteresting.com/smallpox-blankets)
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        >a story which, ironically, turns out to be almost entirely fabricated The same is true for the adage about boiling frogs, but it's still a useful analogy.
      - delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
        > let’s be real here this is really expensive to develop and both us and our employees have bills to pay just like anyone else Couldn't put it better. FOSS advocates want everything for free and source code released every time, all the time. Who's paying the bills? The rent? The mortgage? To be precise, the system sucks, but we have to work within it, and that means profit-driven companies which pay employees liveable salaries so said employees can buy the food and shelter they need to experience a decent life. I'll bet that 95% of FOSS developers either contribute as part their full-time job, or already have full-time jobs with the salary and flexibility that allows them to also contribute to FOSS projects in their free time. Not everyone has this luxury.
        kragen 2y ago
        i don't care. if you don't want to write free software, that's fine with me. but don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining, and don't offer me a gift and then demand payment
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >because historically that has been a guaranteed path to obsolescence Has it? If there's one good thing about Microsoft, it's that basically anything, even from the stone age, is still supported. You can fire up some executable from the 1990s on Windows and it works and you can probably just be a .net dev for the next 50 years if you want to. If there's one company in this industry that takes long term support and backwards compatibility seriously it's Microsoft
  - 0dayz 2y ago
    You're talking about the most broadest of broad experiences here, what about all the proprietary dev products that have been sunset which usually was design to keep in said developer in the walled garden?
    - wvenable 2y ago
      Nobody used them -- except maybe for Silverlight -- but we all know why that model (along with Flash) was retired.
    - Mashimo 2y ago
      I honestly don't know, but what are those?
      - 0dayz 2y ago
        Pretty much anything pre-Edge in the web world, I'm sure there are some deprecated Sharepoint predecessor and similar.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - kragen 2y ago
    tell me more about how valuable my knowledge of mfc and visual basic 5 is now i mean, yes, the code still runs. but it's not useful
- electronbeam 2y ago
  Too many people love smallpox, especially the younger croud who missed the early 2000s
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Please elaborate
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Naturally you also generously support emacs, vim, clang, gcc, idea, eclipse, firefox, and so on for them making your livehood possible, selling your skills.
  - kragen 2y ago
    no; i provide some support for some of them, but the nature of software is that it is infinitely replicable, so in general the efforts of a few suffice to satisfy the needs of many mostly what i offer 'in return' is more free software, which is also how, for example, the vim and gcc teams support each other, for the most part i'm surprised to see your comment because i thought you were old enough to know this already
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      I am old enough to see too many devs abandon open source because it doesn't pay the bills, contrary to the old promises of everyone singing happy songs around the fireplace on a comunity farm kind of ideas. And also to remember Public Domain and the various flavours of Shareware and Demos, which is what Open Core/Dual Licensing are nowadays, by another name.
      - kragen 2y ago
        sure, plenty of people have always abandoned open source for that reason. running a free software business isn't easy. fortunately, the nature of open source is that it doesn't depend on any one person or group, so it keeps working when people abandon it. it's worth noting that over the last 30 years this has worked so well that almost all software of consequence is open-source now, which is why we aren't having this discussion on msn in blackbird or on compuserve i agree that open-core is little more than shareware. dual-licensing is a different model, one pioneered by peter deutsch in the early 90s this is ground we explored extensively on the fsb mailing list in the late 90s. if you're interested in my current thinking on the relationship between markets and open-source knowledge sharing, i've just written a somewhat longer note at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696527
- gregmac 2y ago
  It's an IDE. If you need to edit your code somewhere else, there's a billion other IDEs and text editors, as you pointed out. A guitar doesn't make the musician, and the hammer doesn't make the carpenter. There's specific skill with being able to use tools well, but that's not what makes a programmer, guitarist or carpenter valuable.
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    > A guitar doesn't make the musician, and the hammer doesn't make the carpenter. Is that why famous guitarists play only on specific expensive brands and professional carpenters have favorite instruments?
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      > Is that why famous guitarists play only on specific expensive brands... But that isn't true. Lots of famous guitarists play, and love, the cheap guitar they had before they made it big. Yeah they own lots of expensive guitars (because they like collecting guitars and are rich enough to do it). But they don't only play those.
    - KeplerBoy 2y ago
      Sure we all have our favorite tools, but if something happened to code, we could adapt to one of the other options in a fortnight.
    - onion2k 2y ago
      There's nothing wrong with having a favorite. That's not the same as only being able to use that specific brand. A good guitarist can play any good instrument well, just as a good developer should be able to write good software in an IDE that isn't their preferred one. The favorite tool just makes them a bit better; it isn't required to do the job.
    - wcrossbow 2y ago
      Famous guitarists mostly only play specific expensive brands because they are endorsed by them. Any professional musician can make the cheapest of instruments sound really good. Maybe a note is missed here or there and the sound is not as good as it could be but it will still be way way better than an average player. Here is Satriani playing on a terribly setup guitar [1] His only comment at the end? Oh, that was a little painful. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KZjVZLsU6s&t=20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KZjVZLsU6s&t=20s
- dark-star 2y ago
  Your skills as a developer are never dependent on the tools, APIs or platforms you use. You can always abstract over that. But yes, effectively using your skills will always be somewhat dependent on some company's goodwill. If a product, platform or feature you use goes away, you need to switch. That doesn't only happen for development IDEs. It's a process of learning that happens (or should happen) continuously in any line of work, and especially in software development. As a developer you should already be used to having to switch stuff to something else. Going from DX12 to Vulcan, from x86 to RISC-V, from Linux to FreeBSD, from XCode to EMACS, from Perl to Python, from Angular to Flask, whatever.
  - kragen 2y ago
    yes! always be learning! and learning how to think and create, not just how to operate tools however, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695702 inevitably some of your learning efforts are sunk into the tools, apis, and platforms you use. those can compound over time, making you more effective for the rest of your life, or simply be a pleasant memory. spending time on tools, apis, and platforms that are not dependent on some company's goodwill is helpful here; none of vulkan, x86, risc-v, linux, freebsd, emacs, perl, python, angular, or flask is dependent on any single company (x86? yes, without amd, x86 would have died around 02000 like most other 80s architectures did, killed by intel's itanic blunder.) in the 90s i invested time learning a lot of different tools and platforms. most of them are no longer useful to me because they were dependent on some company or other: vax, vax/vms, informix, netapp, mfc, sunos 4, purify, clearcase, pv-wave idl, erdas imagine, khoros cantata, irix, windows nt 3.51, cde. but, for the most part, those that were open standards (or, better still, free software) remain useful to me to this day: diff and patch, shellutils (now coreutils), tcp/ip, perl, netbsd, emacs, python, html, css, the i386 architecture, bash, vim, c, c++, sql, gcc, gdb, samba, ssh, postscript, tcl, tk, etc. admittedly x.25, smtp, ftp, perl, tcl, twm, and fvwm are not as useful these days, and visual c++ and win32 are still somewhat useful. so it's not 100% black and white. but the longevity difference is extremely striking
- gosub100 2y ago
  I didn't read the article but I could absolutely see MS doing something shady to promote their AI racket: beginning next year, VSCode Basic edition will remain free, but to use Premium AI Cloud additions will cost just $6/month for a basic plan. (Then shoehorn intellisense and a bunch of other features that used to work fine into the "AI" paywall, because it's 2024 and words don't mean anything anymore). Or more likely, "the free version will now contain ads and mandatory telemetry, pay to upgrade to premium for a more streamlined experience". Just like the Mafia, create the problem then sell your their solution.
LaGrange 2y ago
Their business model being bad is not my concern. They're not a broke kid whose bad decisions I'm exploiting. Edit: OTOH reporting on this as if it's a grand surprise is a bit funny. Like come on, this was obvious from the start. I just didn't care, it didn't feel like a fight worth fighting. And I care about BSD/MIT license devs being exploited about as much as MS' business model potentially falling apart because I turn off telemetry: folks knew what they're going into, and did it anyway because "sempai corpo will notice us." Well, it did, congratulations. As for me, I don't care. I ain't posting anything on anything lighter than AGPL, ever, but I'm a small bean and ultimately there's stuff I care about way more than software.
- dumbo-octopus 2y ago
  Their business model is fine, and telemetry has nothing to do with it. The telemetry aspect of the article is a red herring the author introduced seemingly to elicit more popular support on their website and others like it. The core issue has nothing to to with telemetry and everything to do with licensing and intellectual property.
fennecfoxy 2y ago
>Microsoft builds their own IDE for internal use in many other departments >Budget is acceptable to have a flexible modern tool for their own uses >Open source it to gain respect within other communities as well as get free code/bug checking and additional extensions written/supported even outside of MS ecosystem, that MS can still use Doesn't seem that complicated to me...

kragen 2y ago

that's not my problem. my problem is making sure i don't make my own job skills dependent on microsoft's continued goodwill, because historically that has been a guaranteed path to obsolescence. i don't need their engineering work. i have emacs, vim, clang, gcc, idea, eclipse, firefox, and so on i'm only interested in microsoft's generous gift of blankets if they come without smallpox

dumbo-octopus 2y ago
You also have vscode. What you don’t have is the various proprietary extensions msft makes to vscode, just as you don’t have every proprietary extension anyone has ever made to those listed platforms.
- toofy 2y ago
  > You also have vscode. What you don’t have is the various proprietary extensions msft makes… i’m not trying to be confrontational i promise, but i mean, yeah, youre just repeating what we’re discussing… microsoft bangs its drums chanting “please like us again, look at how open source we are. we’re not the same abusive company we used to be… we’ve changed, really.” to many of us, the extension ecosystem is the biggest thing separating code from other IDEs in the first place. this is just more abusive tactics from a company with very very long history of abuse, only this time they try to hide it behind empty “open source community, look how much we love you” rhetoric. i’ve always recommended to organizations to run fast and far from ms products. basically “if you’re looking at a long timescale, you want agility, you want to be able to easily pivot in various other directions. if you use MS, you never know where they’re going to lock you down. run fast and far from them.” and this is just another example of why. i think the commenter above nailed it perfectly with, “they keep telling us we should be grateful for microsoft blankets infected with the smallpox.”
  - dumbo-octopus 2y ago
    Software engineers have to be the most melodramatic lot in existence. Microsoft: you can use this product for your development work freely, but we have licensing in place that prevents redistribution that cuts out our core product offering because let’s be real here this is really expensive to develop and both us and our employees have bills to pay just like anyone else. Internet personalities: the closest thing I might compare this to is the deliberate proliferation of smallpox and the resulting deaths of hundreds of thousands of native americans. (a story which, ironically, turns out to be almost entirely fabricated to spread FUD about the us government… https://allthatsinteresting.com/smallpox-blankets https://allthatsinteresting.com/smallpox-blankets)
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >a story which, ironically, turns out to be almost entirely fabricated The same is true for the adage about boiling frogs, but it's still a useful analogy.
    - delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
      > let’s be real here this is really expensive to develop and both us and our employees have bills to pay just like anyone else Couldn't put it better. FOSS advocates want everything for free and source code released every time, all the time. Who's paying the bills? The rent? The mortgage? To be precise, the system sucks, but we have to work within it, and that means profit-driven companies which pay employees liveable salaries so said employees can buy the food and shelter they need to experience a decent life. I'll bet that 95% of FOSS developers either contribute as part their full-time job, or already have full-time jobs with the salary and flexibility that allows them to also contribute to FOSS projects in their free time. Not everyone has this luxury.
      - kragen 2y ago
        i don't care. if you don't want to write free software, that's fine with me. but don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining, and don't offer me a gift and then demand payment
Barrin92 2y ago
>because historically that has been a guaranteed path to obsolescence Has it? If there's one good thing about Microsoft, it's that basically anything, even from the stone age, is still supported. You can fire up some executable from the 1990s on Windows and it works and you can probably just be a .net dev for the next 50 years if you want to. If there's one company in this industry that takes long term support and backwards compatibility seriously it's Microsoft
- 0dayz 2y ago
  You're talking about the most broadest of broad experiences here, what about all the proprietary dev products that have been sunset which usually was design to keep in said developer in the walled garden?
  - wvenable 2y ago
    Nobody used them -- except maybe for Silverlight -- but we all know why that model (along with Flash) was retired.
  - Mashimo 2y ago
    I honestly don't know, but what are those?
    - 0dayz 2y ago
      Pretty much anything pre-Edge in the web world, I'm sure there are some deprecated Sharepoint predecessor and similar.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- kragen 2y ago
  tell me more about how valuable my knowledge of mfc and visual basic 5 is now i mean, yes, the code still runs. but it's not useful
electronbeam 2y ago
Too many people love smallpox, especially the younger croud who missed the early 2000s
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Please elaborate
pjmlp 2y ago
Naturally you also generously support emacs, vim, clang, gcc, idea, eclipse, firefox, and so on for them making your livehood possible, selling your skills.
- kragen 2y ago
  no; i provide some support for some of them, but the nature of software is that it is infinitely replicable, so in general the efforts of a few suffice to satisfy the needs of many mostly what i offer 'in return' is more free software, which is also how, for example, the vim and gcc teams support each other, for the most part i'm surprised to see your comment because i thought you were old enough to know this already
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    I am old enough to see too many devs abandon open source because it doesn't pay the bills, contrary to the old promises of everyone singing happy songs around the fireplace on a comunity farm kind of ideas. And also to remember Public Domain and the various flavours of Shareware and Demos, which is what Open Core/Dual Licensing are nowadays, by another name.
    - kragen 2y ago
      sure, plenty of people have always abandoned open source for that reason. running a free software business isn't easy. fortunately, the nature of open source is that it doesn't depend on any one person or group, so it keeps working when people abandon it. it's worth noting that over the last 30 years this has worked so well that almost all software of consequence is open-source now, which is why we aren't having this discussion on msn in blackbird or on compuserve i agree that open-core is little more than shareware. dual-licensing is a different model, one pioneered by peter deutsch in the early 90s this is ground we explored extensively on the fsb mailing list in the late 90s. if you're interested in my current thinking on the relationship between markets and open-source knowledge sharing, i've just written a somewhat longer note at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696527
gregmac 2y ago
It's an IDE. If you need to edit your code somewhere else, there's a billion other IDEs and text editors, as you pointed out. A guitar doesn't make the musician, and the hammer doesn't make the carpenter. There's specific skill with being able to use tools well, but that's not what makes a programmer, guitarist or carpenter valuable.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  > A guitar doesn't make the musician, and the hammer doesn't make the carpenter. Is that why famous guitarists play only on specific expensive brands and professional carpenters have favorite instruments?
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    > Is that why famous guitarists play only on specific expensive brands... But that isn't true. Lots of famous guitarists play, and love, the cheap guitar they had before they made it big. Yeah they own lots of expensive guitars (because they like collecting guitars and are rich enough to do it). But they don't only play those.
  - KeplerBoy 2y ago
    Sure we all have our favorite tools, but if something happened to code, we could adapt to one of the other options in a fortnight.
  - onion2k 2y ago
    There's nothing wrong with having a favorite. That's not the same as only being able to use that specific brand. A good guitarist can play any good instrument well, just as a good developer should be able to write good software in an IDE that isn't their preferred one. The favorite tool just makes them a bit better; it isn't required to do the job.
  - wcrossbow 2y ago
    Famous guitarists mostly only play specific expensive brands because they are endorsed by them. Any professional musician can make the cheapest of instruments sound really good. Maybe a note is missed here or there and the sound is not as good as it could be but it will still be way way better than an average player. Here is Satriani playing on a terribly setup guitar [1] His only comment at the end? Oh, that was a little painful. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KZjVZLsU6s&t=20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KZjVZLsU6s&t=20s
dark-star 2y ago
Your skills as a developer are never dependent on the tools, APIs or platforms you use. You can always abstract over that. But yes, effectively using your skills will always be somewhat dependent on some company's goodwill. If a product, platform or feature you use goes away, you need to switch. That doesn't only happen for development IDEs. It's a process of learning that happens (or should happen) continuously in any line of work, and especially in software development. As a developer you should already be used to having to switch stuff to something else. Going from DX12 to Vulcan, from x86 to RISC-V, from Linux to FreeBSD, from XCode to EMACS, from Perl to Python, from Angular to Flask, whatever.
- kragen 2y ago
  yes! always be learning! and learning how to think and create, not just how to operate tools however, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695702 inevitably some of your learning efforts are sunk into the tools, apis, and platforms you use. those can compound over time, making you more effective for the rest of your life, or simply be a pleasant memory. spending time on tools, apis, and platforms that are not dependent on some company's goodwill is helpful here; none of vulkan, x86, risc-v, linux, freebsd, emacs, perl, python, angular, or flask is dependent on any single company (x86? yes, without amd, x86 would have died around 02000 like most other 80s architectures did, killed by intel's itanic blunder.) in the 90s i invested time learning a lot of different tools and platforms. most of them are no longer useful to me because they were dependent on some company or other: vax, vax/vms, informix, netapp, mfc, sunos 4, purify, clearcase, pv-wave idl, erdas imagine, khoros cantata, irix, windows nt 3.51, cde. but, for the most part, those that were open standards (or, better still, free software) remain useful to me to this day: diff and patch, shellutils (now coreutils), tcp/ip, perl, netbsd, emacs, python, html, css, the i386 architecture, bash, vim, c, c++, sql, gcc, gdb, samba, ssh, postscript, tcl, tk, etc. admittedly x.25, smtp, ftp, perl, tcl, twm, and fvwm are not as useful these days, and visual c++ and win32 are still somewhat useful. so it's not 100% black and white. but the longevity difference is extremely striking
gosub100 2y ago
I didn't read the article but I could absolutely see MS doing something shady to promote their AI racket: beginning next year, VSCode Basic edition will remain free, but to use Premium AI Cloud additions will cost just $6/month for a basic plan. (Then shoehorn intellisense and a bunch of other features that used to work fine into the "AI" paywall, because it's 2024 and words don't mean anything anymore). Or more likely, "the free version will now contain ads and mandatory telemetry, pay to upgrade to premium for a more streamlined experience". Just like the Mafia, create the problem then sell your their solution.

LaGrange 2y ago

Their business model being bad is not my concern. They're not a broke kid whose bad decisions I'm exploiting. Edit: OTOH reporting on this as if it's a grand surprise is a bit funny. Like come on, this was obvious from the start. I just didn't care, it didn't feel like a fight worth fighting. And I care about BSD/MIT license devs being exploited about as much as MS' business model potentially falling apart because I turn off telemetry: folks knew what they're going into, and did it anyway because "sempai corpo will notice us." Well, it did, congratulations. As for me, I don't care. I ain't posting anything on anything lighter than AGPL, ever, but I'm a small bean and ultimately there's stuff I care about way more than software.

dumbo-octopus 2y ago
Their business model is fine, and telemetry has nothing to do with it. The telemetry aspect of the article is a red herring the author introduced seemingly to elicit more popular support on their website and others like it. The core issue has nothing to to with telemetry and everything to do with licensing and intellectual property.

fennecfoxy 2y ago

>Microsoft builds their own IDE for internal use in many other departments >Budget is acceptable to have a flexible modern tool for their own uses >Open source it to gain respect within other communities as well as get free code/bug checking and additional extensions written/supported even outside of MS ecosystem, that MS can still use Doesn't seem that complicated to me...