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Comment by ocimbote | Hacker News Reader

Please be more considerate. Sure a very unfortunate decision was made but there's a bunch of people working to offer you and I a true open source alternative to the VSCode ecosystem and I find it excessive and offensive to call that a "pretty shitty move".

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> true open source alternative to the VSCode

Microsoft made VSCode. Microsoft paid for 99% of its development. Thanks to Microsoft, VSCode has the level of development activity and the sheer volume of changes it has. If Microsoft didn't make VSCode, it would end up just like any other crappy Javascript code editor (like Atom).

It's nice that Microsoft made the code open source. I can respect that. If you want me to respect someone just taking Microsoft's code, repackaging it and cutting off the original extension ecosystem... yea, you'll have a hard time convincing me to do that.

> I find it excessive and offensive

Well I find it excessive and offensive to (from the moral point of view) steal Microsoft's code and make it your own without really adding much (if anything) on your own.

Atom was doing great and I was happy with it until VS code started to create nuclear winter, freezing other efforts.

I will gladly pay a premium for someone to offer me I real VS Code alternative.

Nova almost solves my problems.

> I will gladly pay a premium for someone to offer me I real VS Code alternative.

https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/

Spoiler: telemetry is also on by default

By “steal” do you mean “use in accordance with the license that Microsoft chose”?

That's why I said "morally". The fact that I can take the SQLite code (for example), change a few lines so it's now TotallyNotSQLiteDB, compile it and sell it as my own, without me ever contributing anything back, is not really morally right. The fact that the licence allows such use is a different thing. And you're free to do immoral, but otherwise perfectly legal things. The thing here is that if you're going to do immoral things, people could have have a problem with respecting you or your project. I don't respect people who rebrand open source projects. If you fork a project and add significant work, then that's great and in the spirit of open source (e.g. Electron taking Chromium and Node and making something new and great, Mariadb forking Mysql and going their way with it etc. etc.), but rebrands suck.

the response itself was shitty - there is a non-shitty way to make the decision that was made. People effectively said "hey this is breaking some workflows and I don't have the bandwidth personally to do the work to correct this, can we revert this and figure out a better way?" and the maintainers basically said "bummer dude, maybe you should make time to port extensions."

If my use of curse words is your problem with my comment, fine. But I don't think it's unfair of me to call out a bad decision and a bad handling of the response to that decision when we're talking about a tool that people will do their daily work in.

I wasn't aware of the poor response of the maintainers.

That contextualizes the situation quite clearly and explains the frustration better. Thanks for the explanation.

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