[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_devel...
[2] https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/14559660287441223...
It's a closed-source application. Stop expecting that. Yes we all want everyone to write nothing but free software all the time, and yes we all specifically want pylance to be open source, but saying that the existence of closed-source code is an attack on open source is both silly and wrong. Would you be happier if the entire .NET ecosystem were closed-source?
Add a dash of people not caring about FOSS tooling (ie mass adoption of visual studio) and the future could be grim.
There is currently a very large amount of infinity stones (core developer tools across all ecosystems) under the control of a single company (!) and reporting to a single person (!)
I hope the cynic within is wrong about this one.
Open source has always been largely the work of people funded by hostile corporate interests. The very words "open source" came from hostile corporate interests because "free software" scared their finance people.
And people never cared about FOSS tooling in the past. A whole lot of open source developers use Windows and macOS. There was a time when Sublime Text was as popular as Visual Studio Code. .NET gained its popularity while it was closed source, while Miguel de Icaza was reimplementing it as Mono.
(Frankly, there was a time - which only ended a couple years ago - when Visual Studio proper, not Code, was not even freely available, never mind open-source-ness.)
So, no, it's not distinguishable, but that's a good thing, because it means that no extinguishing is going to happen. And it's strictly better than Microsoft spending their time enhancing closed-source software, no? That was my question at the end: they could make .NET closed-source (as it was when Mono was a thing) and write a high-quality, Windows-only type inference engine for that - are you claiming that would have been preferable?
How on Earth did you reach that conclusion? A trivial look at that list:
* Web browsers. -- Worked so well that IE remained the dominant browser for over a decade [1]. Of course, bundling was important here too but without the intentional incompatibilities between IE and Netscape, bundling alone would not have been nearly as effective.
* Office documents. -- Despite .docx files being notionally based on an open standard, to this day, Microsoft office will frequently reject as "corrupted" .docx files that have been edited using other implementations of the OOXML standard (in my experience, particularly when tracked changes are enabled or images are involved). In most such cases in my experience, the sentiment from coworkers is "why don't you just install Word" --- so apparently still working as intended.
* Instant messaging -- seems to have worked pretty well at the time [2] and remained popular for nearly a decade. And while they later lost marketshare to transformationally different technologies (texting, mobile messaging), the competitors against which they used the strategy remain dead.
* Against Java -- Led to major legal action, in which Microsoft was forced to pay Sun >$2B and agree to discontinue the practice in settlements, presumably only because by now people were catching on to the strategy. Failing that, Microsoft just made a separate competing language for cross-platform (AKA "write once run anywhere" :) development and called it.... .NET [3]
> And it's strictly better than Microsoft spending their time enhancing closed-source software, no? That was my question at the end: they could make .NET closed-source
Presumably it is reasonable to assume that they would like to grow the market share of .NET. While more open code is usually good, I would indeed not consider it "strictly better" if their goal in this work is to capture market share against other languages by leveraging the popularity and community that comes with "Open Source", while leaving them in a position where they can then reassert hegemonic control over their language via exactly the pathway being discussed here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#First_Browser_War...
[2] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
[3] The tagline on https://dotnet.microsoft.com is currently "Free. Cross-platform. Open source." The "Open Source" part of course only added somewhat more recently after the closed-source version failed to dethrone Java. Not that I like Java so much or anything, but you get the point.