So if there is a "killer extension" not available on codium's marketplace, you can still use it through microsoft's marketplace.
[1] - https://parsiya.net/blog/2021-12-20-rce-in-visual-studio-cod...
[2] - https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/746
I don't see why they'd put out an open-source app, whose most useful extensions only work if you accept a closed binary known to phone home.
I can see them trying to win goodwill from devs and steer them to their Azure/Windows offerings by releasing such an editor. But why insist on this telemetry-laden distribution, which is still free-as-in-beer?
But why would they force the use of their "official" VS Code build for this? Couldn't they just charge for their "impressive" plugins, regardless of the edition of VS Code used? The JetBrains "community" IDEs (open source and gratis) can use paid plugins from their marketplace.
The idea behind LSP and Microsoft's initial open source work on LSP were both excellent. That launched seven years ago, and I don't think that we would have seen the near universal adoption of LSP among open source editors nor the dominance of VS Code among developers if they had been paid products from the start. Now that they have a large enough market share, they can make the LSP engines proprietary without most developers even noticing. The gap between the proprietary and open source solutions can now be widened both by the open source community shrinking and by Microsoft pumping money into improving their LSP engines. The more that gap widens, the more people migrate to VS Code from open alternatives. That becomes a self-reinforcing loop.
Once VS Code is significantly better than open source alternatives and they have a huge market share, Microsoft is in a very strong position to start collecting rent. Switching costs on an editor are nontrivial to begin with, and are enhanced by the induced atrophy of open source alternatives. Despite the fact that this strategy takes more than a decade to execute, I would guess that it ends better for Microsoft overall than if they were to start charging for VS Code back in 2016.
Paid monthly premium LSP subscription honestly would be a great idea from a business perspective, even though it's distasteful.
Today, there is only one canonical editor: Visual Studio Code. 75% of professional programmers use it. Microsoft was trying to get the open source crowd back into their tooling fold -- and they've succeeded! Which means now they have a hugely expanded developer base to sell tools and services to. Remember their money is now in cloud, not desktop software -- so think things like GitHub Codespaces. (The entire devcontainer ecosystem comes from Microsoft and is oriented specifically around Visual Studio Code's model of remote development.)
But why does selling those features, especially the ones requiring a separate cloud subscription, require a specific build of an app which is otherwise open source?
Honestly, the more I learn about Visual Studio Code the more I understand why Emacs is the way it is. Stallman was trying to keep it fully hackable forever.
But I do wonder how much VS Code being "kinda open source" mattered. I may be in an MS-centric bubble, but most people I interact with couldn't care less about that. They're using closed-source software all over. Their main reasons for switching to VS Code seem to be the free-as-in-beer part, and that it's more practical than the OG VisualStudio. They're 99% Windows devs.
They didn't really change, they got just better in PR.
I did not know this and this is enough for me to steer clear of extensions by Microsoft (and potentially VSCode).