Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

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There are perpetual reminders all around that Microsoft's only pretending to like f/oss because that's where the developer attention (and thus corporate money) is. There's spyware in all of their open source apps (TypeScript excluded, because they couldn't get away with it there) that you can of course patch out, but you can't get it removed from the project because, free software or not, Microsoft gets to decide what goes in or out.

Bet you a dollar the GitHub mobile app that's going to come out pretty soon will also be totally proprietary with no source provided. It's a growing trend in developer tooling: even Docker's desktop versions (not Microsoft's fault, but still) are not even open source (much less free software).

It's going to be really sad in a few years when Microsoft starts turning the screws to extract more revenue from this free software ecosystem (GitHub/npm) that they are coming to exert major control over.

Soon, the most common "industry standard" tooling for the largest and most popular software development ecosystem (javascript) will rely heavily on proprietary software that spies on you continuously while you use it, just like Windows.

> Bet you a dollar the GitHub mobile app that's going to come out pretty soon will also be totally proprietary with no source provided.

Stable version already came out a while ago, been using it on my phone. Also, GitHub the website has never been open source and they never pretended it was or was going to be, so no one was holding breath for source code of the mobile app.

I mean, they could have totally released the source and it probably wouldn’t impact their bottom line at all.

It would make quite a dent in support contracts for their on-prem offering.

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't. The mobile app isn't something that requires a ton of support anyway. What good would the source code do you in this case?

I think jon-wood was talking about the website’s source code, not the mobile app.

The view of the Eclipse Foundation onto VS Code may be interesting here: https://blogs.eclipse.org/post/mike-milinkovich/theia-open-s...

whoa, slick.

Yeah, this.

The analogy seems clear to me: The web is to IE as git is to VSCode, eh?

At the very least, it makes it harder for an editor to be a competitor to VSCode w/o integrating with GitHub (not just git) now, eh?

It’s telling that they went with VScode and not Atom. Makes me wonder what the long term outlook for Atom is.

Not really. At least: the web happened well before IE was introduced as an answer. In contrast, VS Code was invented much later than git which at the time was an established technology and in some ways a standard.

The other context here is that IE was a competitive browser in its time: 1998-2001. The problem is that it won and then languished. IE had a lot of sway over how developers built things as the market share grew. Then it locked in users in various ways which starved the other competitors.

It took until Phoenix (now Firefox), for there to be something better that grabbed the attention of developers and those sick of being stuck with IE. It became Firefox and Mozilla hatched a pretty effective plan to steal market share. For all of Mozilla's recent failings, we forget (or weren't around to remember) the success of Firefox was pretty impressive as it was a grassroots effort.

GitHub has always been a proprietary company unconcerned with user freedom.

They actually have a whitepaper that predates acquisition on exactly this:

https://resources.github.com/whitepapers/introduction-to-inn...

The company has always been unethical; Microsoft didn't change that.

Wait for radicle.xyz

Those of you downvoting this - can you explain what you disagree with here?

Because it looks like a good analysis of this part of Microsoft's strategy to turn "Open Source" into a spyware-laden sausage machine for Azure.

I think the downvotes are because Microsoft has been providing some amazing tools completely free of charge. If that helps them sell more Azure... great! Everyone wins, except GitLab and AWS.

Calling it spyware is hyperbolic.

Keep it up Microsoft.

Some of us have longer memories of Microsoft's game-plan - embrace and extend. With so man now willing to grant Microsoft open source cred don't forget that it wasn't so long ago that Microsoft was running a Linux patent racket. If we allow The Beast to monopolise open source development tools we have only ourselves to blame.

Microsoft has been adopting standards to then extend them and lock-in users for two decades.

> Microsoft has been providing some amazing tools completely free of charge

Yes, and they are the opposite of a no-profit.

This are just the first steps: "embrace" and "extend".

Not at all. There are no objective criteria to define spyware that do not also apply to Windows or VS Code (and probably the GitHub mobile app, but I have not yet confirmed that).

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