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Comment by alexmcc81 | Hacker News Reader

You're right - it is a trojan horse and people are eating up the 'MS heart Open Source' PR. It's obvious when you look at what they're doing with language servers.

They've replaced the open source Python language server with a closed source one. The C/C++ was always closed. Their remote feature and collaboration tools are also closed. They're slowly making people depend on MS services without even realising it.

They want you to run your development environment on Azure and are making it possible piece by piece, turning your IDE into a thin client. And they're open about that aim but still call VS Code "open source". It is not - it has open source components and lots of telemetry so MS can develop those services. If people are happy with that, so be it but the 'love' they get is undeserved.

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I didn't realize they replaced the Python language server with a proprietary one, that's too bad. https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/4 has some brief discussion before it was closed.

> They've replaced the open source Python language server with a closed source one. The C/C++ was always closed. Their remote feature and collaboration tools are also closed. They're slowly making people depend on MS services without even realising it.

So, what you're saying is that the absolutely enormous number of Python and C/C++ people can't produce a decent open-source plugin while tiny communities like the Rust folks can?

I don't like what Microsoft is doing here, but, let's be honest, the "open source community" has also spoken and what it has said is "We are a bunch of cheap, selfish jerks."

You don't have to fund very many programmers to create these plugins. Full-time funding for maybe 5 or 6 programmers per plugin can pull it off (and maybe not that for something like the remote development plugin). And not all programmers around the world cost $200K per year. However, even if they did, that's $1 million per year to support a plugin.

So, no company or individual out of the entire Python or C/C++ ecosystem thinks that's a worthwhile expense? No group of 5 or 6 companies think that's a worthwhile expense?

As we found with OpenSSL and other open source projects, no, apparently they don't.

Don't bemoan Microsoft's licensing when the problem sits with the "open source community" being cheap bastards.

Multiple open source C++ language server for VS Code already exist.

Open-source C/C++ LSP server exists, clangd exists and ccls(https://github.com/MaskRay/ccls) is build on libclang which works very well for a few of my projects. I am not sure about python since i don't use it much.

> And they're open about that aim but still call VS Code "open source".

Yeah, it's a principle worth remembering: "open source" doesn't mean anything if most of the software only runs on someone else's cloud without you having any control or visibility into it.

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