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Comment by usui | Hacker News Reader

A hot-button issue gets corrected now, but then they continue to make subtler moves. 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.

Microsoft is a big company with changing microcultures all the time. They alone as a whole should not take credit for their open-source endeavors. In general, big contributor names should be emphasized more, so that we know when they leave Microsoft or the project.

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> 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?

They 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.

Also as a way to promote Typescript, since VSCode has great Typescript support, which is also something by Microsoft.

well 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.

It's a business, of course they didn't make it altruistically.

I 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.

IntelliJ 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

In 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)

vscode is heavily marketed as open source, not open core. yet key microsoft extensions are closed, as people are often surprised to find out

Make yourself a coffee, get in front of the keyboard and start writing code to replace those extensions.

I don't use vscode (or IntelliJ)

IntelliJ 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.

It'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?

>Many interesting parts of the Python extension are closed source

What stops you or anyone else to reimplement those parts?

If 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.

This. 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?

Inexorably, the locus of making money moves from using one's skill and ability to build software to skimming rent off enormous capital investments: billions of ad impressions, billions of e-commerce transactions, millions of cloud cpus,

Somebody built awesome software and dares charging money for it? Bring on the tar and feathers!

The key difference between the two situation is, that the vs code team does it juicy features as a secret project. Dotnet watch was developed, tested and licensed in the public and stripped out last second.

VS Code behavior you can accept as a open core or commercial plugin thing. The other thing was just a theft.

I want to extend in this a bit: Scott, Damian, Scott, David, Rich, Immo ... If you read this: fight for a clear ahead of time separation of commercial and non commercial features. Many of us can understand that Microsoft still sells dev tools but we do not like bad communication and stuff taking away which have been there already (at the same time we also think that .NET can only become truly awesome when free tools exists ... because für your competition these exists).

The reason why I feel somewhat encouraged is because my understanding is that this exact group of people fighting to keep this in is why it was reverted. I have no idea who knew what when or how anyone would have reacted without public scrutiny but David Fowler has been hyping hot reload since at least May on Twitter and it seems obvious to me that he and many other team members were 100% behind the planned dotnet watch hot reload approach. Maybe public outcry gave them the ammunition to fight this fight, and I may be naive, but I have a hard time thinking that at least some of that group wasn’t against this decision from the beginning (though who knows if they even learned about it much in advance of it being public).

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