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Comment by lin83 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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