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Comment by chenzhekl | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the same as what MS did for the Python extension when the open-source LSP was replaced by the proprietary Pylance. I get the feeling that MS becomes more and more likes Google. For example, on Android, the core experience is provided by GMS while the AOSP is provided as an open-source core. In terms of VSCode, the core editor is free and open-source, but some key experience is baked by proprietary components (e.g., Remote plugins, Pylance, etc.). And the trending is that more and more plugins which are controlled by MS are moving towards to a mixture of open-source code and proprietary components.

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The LSP situation with Python was very frustrating, because it totally breathes the oxygen out of "proper" OSS implementations.

I feel like with a _loooot_ of coordination it should be possible to have proper, open source LSP implementations that are very performant. Mainly a question of finding enough people willing to fund this work, because it's definitely work!

I personally also have gripes about ending up with some JS thing to do constant parsing and processing of files.... but I don't have anything to back it up.

Indeed.

And even very intelligent, competent AND benevolent MS employees downplay this: https://twitter.com/bitecode_dev/status/1537357261554733056

Steve cannot see how it will lead to attrition or vendor lock in.

It's not that there are no good people at MS, but the internal marketting is strong as well.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

I'm having a hard time finding the flaw with this logic, I use pyright but not pylance every day in Neovim and am not locked in at all.

Making "the LSP sever that leverages pyright" closed source sucks but is far from the end of the world. If the complaint is that pyright could eventually become non-OSS well that's true of everything.

It's about the VSCode ecosystems becoming more and more close source to accomodate the dev env as a service strat while using the FOSS root of vscode for PR that deserved to be underlined.

I can't even see what the reason for making an LSP implementation proprietary would be other than lock-in. The argument seems to be "we make it closed so that it can't connect to other things that are closed", which feels pretty silly. Being closed is bad when other people do it, but good when you do it?

Unhappy that you can't have his work for free, you asked /him/ to hand you an equivalent on a plate. He said no. What's he downplaying?

I noticed vendor lock in. He answered "we only lock the easy bits", which is already a weird idea. Like saying we are only not transparent on the small spending on our IRS declaration.

I then question the easy part by asking, tongue in chick, to tell me how I can do the same with FOSS easily. It's freedom I am talking about, not price. Indeed, the proprietary work in question is available without payment already.

IMO this is more an attack on FLOSS/Python than anything else. LSP is pretty quickly becoming a predominant standard for free software editors. Making LSP proprietary for Python will kill it as a language for larger project by FLOSS developers as they won't want to use the proprietary component. I know I'll never use proprietary products in my creative pipeline as they should be open for anyone to work on at any economic level. I don't want to lock people out of working on my projects due to a restrictive development environment.

Yep, they saw no real backlash to doing this for the Python one, then decided to do it here as well.

Of course not. Python is in the hands of people with a mixed contribution history (to say the least) who want to preserve their jobs at Google, Microsoft, RedHat etc. The rest of the Python "community" does as they are told.

They are not in a position to voice dissent, unlike de Icaza, who has a great programming record and courage.

I sympathyze with Icaza because he does a lot of stuff.

His reaction is unexpected though -- after all this is the playbook FSF is always warning as a possible path. He must have been aware of the possible paths and the fear of them when Novell was trying to bring C# onto Linux / Gnome.

Icaza is a financially made man. He can do what he likes!

Because most people continued to use VSCode and didn't notice. Other LSP users' communities noticed, but were too small to make a vocal impact.

Sorry to say, but it is not like M$ is becoming more like Google.

Google learnt their playbook from M$.

What you and others are seeing here is M$ at its best, playing like they always played, but without the "we love open-source" mask.

Why didn't MS just contribute to the existing one, instead of writing its own from scratch?

Imperialism, basically.

Contributing to open source means you don't wholly own the project you contributed to, and that constrains what you can do with it.

The existing one was an open source Microsoft project. Then they built a new closed-source version as a replacement.

To be fair, pylance is orders of magnitude better with regards to performance. But I just don’t get what the reasoning was to make pylance closed source. It’s baffling.

I believe the previous Python support extension started out as an independent open source project until Microsoft hired its main developer.

> It’s baffling.

Vendor Lock in? Same reason you can't use the VSCode marketplace of mostly open source extensions on a non-Microsoft build of VSCode or any of the remote work features.

The Python extension itself is not closed source and is still maintained by the original developer that MS hired. It’s the language server that went from an OSS Microsoft project (that replaced the initial Jedi server) to the closed source LSP server.

Lock in doesn’t make sense to me. The main competition is Pycharm which has its own set of tooling.

I can somewhat understand the remote extensions being closed source considering they need to interface with a server. It makes no sense for Python.

My guess is that Pylance is also used within Visual Studio proper, and the VS product owners are pushing for closed addons.

Idk, it seems pretty clearly like lock-in to me. Microsoft first came up with LSP when VS Code was a lot newer, so they made it an open standard to help them get market share by enabling language developers to more easily support their editor. Now that they're a much bigger player in the text editor space (which VS proper never really played as hard in, not being cross platform and being much heavier weight), they're trying to build a moat to ensure that they don't lose that to other players, which means making it harder for anyone to re-use the tools they used to gain share in the first place.

My understanding is that pylance bundles in several ML models that back a lot of its performance increases over pyright and it is the ML models and closed-source data science that caused the LSP closure.

I think data science also is best when it itself is open/open-source, and peer reviewed.

I can understand why Microsoft wants to make that a moat to protect expensive data science and ML research boundaries and it doesn't seem that baffling to me if that is indeed the reason why they closed source pylance, even as I question if it was the best choice.

Thanks for this, it was definitely news to me. If this is the case then it makes slightly more sense, but is still disappointing.

I don't understand this. It makes sense "because ML"?

Unfortunately, yes. I know a lot of companies (here on HN, my current employer, etc) are talking about ML like it is cheap and easy to build, but you get what you pay for and right now it looks from budgets that Microsoft is paying for a lot of high quality effort. Again, I think it would be beneficial if more of this work was done out in the open, in part to open it to good critique and peer review, and in part to make it more obvious to everyone (including companies such as my current employer) that proper data science is still an expensive investment that requires a ton of work and hidden costs. But the catch-22 there is of course the more expensive the investment the greater the desire to protect it and keep it secret (at least in the short term where it seems a competitive advantage).

No, because it's no longer "just code". Bundling in assets (ML models, server keys, etc) makes it more difficult to open source something. So, while I don't agree that it should be closed source, it makes a little more sense to me why they might have gone that way.

Realistically it's probably also code reuse from their enterprise products(Visual Studio) which are very good at C# analysis.

Pylance (and the open source less featured version, pyright) is architected after the Typescript language server. Which makes sense as they're both languages with unsound type systems, optional type annotations, and use type inference. By being written in TS it also runs in a web browser which is their Next Big Thing.

There isn't an Existing One, more like many existing ones with their own tradeoffs. Jedi is designed to infer the variable in your currently editing LOC. It can't type check and report issues on entire files/projects. It's also a one man project.

Just for balance, Pylance is proprietary but the core of it is the Pyright library which is completely open (see: https://github.com/microsoft/pyright).

It would be nice if they were more transparent about the differences between the two and why Pylance is closed. There are a few github issues where Microsoft PMs basically stonewall the community with very little info.

> And the trending is that more and more plugins which are controlled by MS are moving towards to a mixture of open-source code and proprietary components.

Other than this fact, what is the effect, supposedly detrimental?

It appears offering free beer forever isn't sustainable, even when one has deep pockets, go figure.

Sustainable and optimal are different. For a company like Microsoft at least.

Shareware and Public Domain are back with a different name, many still haven't gotten it.

I somehow doubt that Microsoft has any pressing need to return profits from the python LSP

It gets to share the same code with Visual Studio proper.

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