Then they will be able to start with messing things, like requiring proprietary extensions to lock down the thing. I guess a lot of people here don't remember the good old time of Visual Studio on Windows.
Which they are already doing in a lot of places. For instance, the VSCode Python extension replaced the open source language server with a proprietary rewrite (PyLance)[0]. They also have quite a few extensions that are proprietary, like LiveView.
And it's worth noting that those extensions explicitly forbid running in anything other than the official VSCode from Microsoft. Forks cannot legally run those extensions, and some of the extensions will have DRM to prevent it from happening[1].
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/n9yse1/as_of_today_...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_devel...
Unless these extensions were closed source Microsoft-authored?
Honest question: How would we know that? Is it possible to somehow diff vscode's code with the open source repo? Is there an analysis available somewhere of the differences?
Maybe not, but it's absolutely insidious to have open source features and then replace them with proprietary ones.
Its prevalence could had been averted if Linux folks were not that stuck in command prompt editors for ssh work, and lecturing beginners about their incompetence to learn the keyboard commands of vi.
At some point there was some work in forwarding UI via X11, but it was very clunky and slow. The Remote Desktop capabilities of Linux are also atrocious for rendering text.
So here we are, Microsoft covered the gaps that the community underplayed for decades, and now is dominating.
It's a different group of people steering the ship then it was 25 years ago.
I know how fun it is to presume they are being exclusively evil but who knows, things can change
tl;dr: MS is still evil.
They had been doing mobile ever since the mostly fiction pen windows (which became windows CE a few years later) in 1992 but lost that battle so hard with things like Kin and Lumia they dropped out. And let's forget about Zune.
At one point they has 95% of the browser market but lost that so much that they completely abandoned their browser engine.
Despite all the money they've thrown at projects like Surface and Bing, they have failed to come anywhere near a dominant position. Even in gaming consoles, which has been fairly successful, they're still in 3rd place behind Sony and Nintendo after over 20 years.
Their cloud azure is nowhere near AWS ... being a barbarian emperor hasn't been working for them for a long time and demanding the 1970s IBM style vertically integrated infrastructure is not a luxury they have.
Is it a different group of people than were steering when they decided to patent troll Android OEMs less than a decade ago?
Is it a different group of people than were steering when they started abusing their desktop market share to strong arm their way into the browser market last year? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29415031)
Microsoft didn't change, they're just being more careful now that their position is weaker.
It's like with orientation detection. You'd think that after a decade this would have been a done thing. On the contrary: it amazes me to no end how many times a day people want to show me something on their phone and then go like 'oh wait..shake phone..nope..shake again..finally got it'. When I ask them why they don't just turn it off or replace it with a hardware or software button they say something about it sometimes working and/or not wanting to lookup where to change the setting. Same with voice control in the past years. This is getting better it seems, slowly, but I can't keep track of the number of times people were getting angry because their words wouldn't come through and the navigation wasn't driving them where they want or their text message were full of bs. Still they persist, seemingly because 'I paid for this new thing so I better try'. Which is utterly nonsensical for an engineering mind.
My girlfriend is the only person I know with an IPhone, and her spelling got much worse over the last year when she had to get a new phone. Every time I tease her she blames the phone, some of the corrections aren't even words. It's just silly at this point. She also has to watch ads on websites because there is no firefox/ublock origin, I don't know how she tolerates it.
Notably the Content Blocker implementation is in typical Apple form. The interface with Safari is such that Safari itself is applying a ruleset to the page, and the CB only provides the rules. That means the CB never sees the pages you’re actually browsing.
> Then they will be able to start with messing things, like requiring proprietary extensions to lock down the thing
Some extensions are already closed source: Remote Development, Python, and probably tons of other which I didn't even notice. So what? What does it change in practice? What's stopping anyone from creating their open source alternative if it bothers them?
Now let's say they "extinguish" their extension ecosystem. Then they die and everyone switches to VSCodium and open-vsx for extensions. Again, what's the problem?
I honestly think they're in a position where not only the EEE is not their strategy anymore, but also it's not even doable with the state of VSCode.
Now, what exactly are your arguments?