Doesn't seem that complicated to me...
i'm only interested in microsoft's generous gift of blankets if they come without smallpox
mostly what i offer 'in return' is more free software, which is also how, for example, the vim and gcc teams support each other, for the most part
i'm surprised to see your comment because i thought you were old enough to know this already
And also to remember Public Domain and the various flavours of Shareware and Demos, which is what Open Core/Dual Licensing are nowadays, by another name.
i agree that open-core is little more than shareware. dual-licensing is a different model, one pioneered by peter deutsch in the early 90s
this is ground we explored extensively on the fsb mailing list in the late 90s. if you're interested in my current thinking on the relationship between markets and open-source knowledge sharing, i've just written a somewhat longer note at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696527
I don't know what solution you're promoting because Free Software still works. The professional for-profit software industry is in the toilet right now - Open Source is destroying it in a certain for-profit purview.
Has it? If there's one good thing about Microsoft, it's that basically anything, even from the stone age, is still supported. You can fire up some executable from the 1990s on Windows and it works and you can probably just be a .net dev for the next 50 years if you want to. If there's one company in this industry that takes long term support and backwards compatibility seriously it's Microsoft
Silverlight, Internet Explorer, Windows Phone, Microsoft Edge (Legacy), Windows Media Center, Microsoft Expression, Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Zune, Kinect, Cortana (on mobile devices), Groove Music, Windows Mobile, FrontPage, ActiveX, Visual Basic 6, Windows XP, Windows 7, Skype for Business (being replaced by Teams), Office Picture Manager, DCOM, Winforms (considered legacy), .NET Remoting (superseded by WCF), WCF itself now considered largely obsolete, Classic ASP.NET (Web Forms), etc.
While Microsoft does offer LTS for core products, they also regularly obsolete technologies, often driven by market changes or strategic shifts. Their rate of obsolescence is comparable to other major tech companies.
i mean, yes, the code still runs. but it's not useful
Last time I checked one can still choose optional MFC component of desktop development in vs installer and it will let you build old code with latest toolchain and do maintenance. Not that it makes any sense in 2024 but its still there.
ps. I've been hitting F5 every working day in vs for entire career and have no plans to switch to anything else =)
A guitar doesn't make the musician, and the hammer doesn't make the carpenter.
There's specific skill with being able to use tools well, but that's not what makes a programmer, guitarist or carpenter valuable.
A good guitar player or a good carpenter sure as shit know a good tool from a bad tool. Good tools are force multipliers and can can make somebody much better than without the tool.
Plus bad tools can actively keep people away from learning new things. A shitty soldering iron can absolutely convince somebody they suck at soldering. Sure a pro can make use of a shitty soldering iron but they won’t do it willingly and their output will be subpar. Same with cooking and bad knives. Same with anything.
The argument that “tools don’t make somebody good” is pretty silly. They absolutely do.
I disagree, but only because I'd rephrase what you're saying as "good tools are force multipliers for skilled people". You can give a beginner musician the most expensive guitar rig, and they'll still sound like a beginner.
I also never said what you're arguing against. The GP was essentially complaining that using vscode would hamstring their career because their skill would be in something Microsoft could take away. What I was trying to say is the reason programmers get paid isn't because they're good at using their IDE, it's because they're good at programming. I believe the GP's concern is misplaced.
Consider: Do you go to a restaurant because their chef uses expensive high-end knives, or because they have good food?
i wrote one of those comments specifically in response to your comment, in order to correct your misreading of mine, so you really have no excuse whatsoever for not having read it
i still have some keybindings in emacs from when i used visual c++ last millennium, and i'm probably using emacs in significant part because i started using lugaru epsilon in about 01989. since then i've also used vi, vim, idea, eclipse, nedit, and the f83 editor, but i keep ending up back in emacs sort of by default. and i think my level of flexibility on this count is far above average
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696512 for a more in-depth exploration of this
Oh, I'm sorry. The tools don't matter.
Is that why famous guitarists play only on specific expensive brands and professional carpenters have favorite instruments?
Here is Satriani playing on a terribly setup guitar [1] His only comment at the end? Oh, that was a little painful.
But that isn't true. Lots of famous guitarists play, and love, the cheap guitar they had before they made it big. Yeah they own lots of expensive guitars (because they like collecting guitars and are rich enough to do it). But they don't only play those.
IDEs are usually far more complex due to their vast feature sets and constant evolution. If guitars evolved and increased in complexity at the same rate as IDEs, we would've seen something absurd like James Hetfield wielding a 150-string monster guitar.
IDEs have become incredibly complex tools with features that go far beyond the original concept of text editing, while guitars have remained relatively consistent in their core design and function over decades.
We don't have to keep practicing typing "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" over and over again to master an IDE, while you have to play same tunes again and again to become a virtuoso. Experienced musicians often have a broader, more adaptable skill set and can change instruments, while IDE users might be more "locked in" to their preferred environment for various reasons.
I agree with your sentiment though - good programmers are good not because they've mastered their tools - they chose to master their tools because they are good programmers.
almost all pianos have more strings than that; the bottom octave or so have two strings each and the rest of the keys have three strings each, for a total of somewhere around 250 strings. pipe organs are routinely significantly more complex than that. but a lot of the elaboration in musical instruments doesn't take the form of increasing the number of parts; instead we have things like special varnishes, holes cut in particular shapes, special alloys for strings, tweaked electronic circuit designs, tweaked magnetic pickup designs, etc. i'm not sure it would be easier for a random person to learn how to make a stratocaster-competitive electric guitar than it would be for them to learn how to write an emacs-competitive ide
as for lazy dogs, i think it's common for both programmers and musicians to practice etudes, not just for instrument mastery (which is only a small part of the problem both in programming and in music). a typing class in eighth grade was enormously helpful to me in programming even though, as everyone knows, typing is only rarely the bottleneck in programming. and i think it's pretty common for programmers to spend time on practicing the effective use of one ide feature or another, watch screencasts of other programmers using them, buy books about particular ides, etc. check out https://www.vimgolf.com/challenges/9v0062d0773d000000000225 http://vimcasts.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDIQ17T3sRk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGrBHohIgQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p09i_hoFdd0 etc.
As a developer you should already be used to having to switch stuff to something else. Going from DX12 to Vulcan, from x86 to RISC-V, from Linux to FreeBSD, from XCode to EMACS, from Perl to Python, from Angular to Flask, whatever.
however, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695702
inevitably some of your learning efforts are sunk into the tools, apis, and platforms you use. those can compound over time, making you more effective for the rest of your life, or simply be a pleasant memory. spending time on tools, apis, and platforms that are not dependent on some company's goodwill is helpful here; none of vulkan, x86, risc-v, linux, freebsd, emacs, perl, python, angular, or flask is dependent on any single company
(x86? yes, without amd, x86 would have died around 02000 like most other 80s architectures did, killed by intel's itanic blunder.)
in the 90s i invested time learning a lot of different tools and platforms. most of them are no longer useful to me because they were dependent on some company or other: vax, vax/vms, informix, netapp, mfc, sunos 4, purify, clearcase, pv-wave idl, erdas imagine, khoros cantata, irix, windows nt 3.51, cde. but, for the most part, those that were open standards (or, better still, free software) remain useful to me to this day: diff and patch, shellutils (now coreutils), tcp/ip, perl, netbsd, emacs, python, html, css, the i386 architecture, bash, vim, c, c++, sql, gcc, gdb, samba, ssh, postscript, tcl, tk, etc.
admittedly x.25, smtp, ftp, perl, tcl, twm, and fvwm are not as useful these days, and visual c++ and win32 are still somewhat useful. so it's not 100% black and white. but the longevity difference is extremely striking
i’m not trying to be confrontational i promise, but i mean, yeah, youre just repeating what we’re discussing…
microsoft bangs its drums chanting “please like us again, look at how open source we are. we’re not the same abusive company we used to be… we’ve changed, really.”
to many of us, the extension ecosystem is the biggest thing separating code from other IDEs in the first place.
this is just more abusive tactics from a company with very very long history of abuse, only this time they try to hide it behind empty “open source community, look how much we love you” rhetoric.
i’ve always recommended to organizations to run fast and far from ms products. basically “if you’re looking at a long timescale, you want agility, you want to be able to easily pivot in various other directions. if you use MS, you never know where they’re going to lock you down. run fast and far from them.” and this is just another example of why.
i think the commenter above nailed it perfectly with, “they keep telling us we should be grateful for microsoft blankets infected with the smallpox.”
Internet personalities: the closest thing I might compare this to is the deliberate proliferation of smallpox and the resulting deaths of hundreds of thousands of native americans. (a story which, ironically, turns out to be almost entirely fabricated to spread FUD about the us government… https://allthatsinteresting.com/smallpox-blankets)
Couldn't put it better. FOSS advocates want everything for free and source code released every time, all the time. Who's paying the bills? The rent? The mortgage?
To be precise, the system sucks, but we have to work within it, and that means profit-driven companies which pay employees liveable salaries so said employees can buy the food and shelter they need to experience a decent life.
I'll bet that 95% of FOSS developers either contribute as part their full-time job, or already have full-time jobs with the salary and flexibility that allows them to also contribute to FOSS projects in their free time. Not everyone has this luxury.
Who's doing this? VS Code is free; Pylance is free, cppdbg is free, the C# suite is free. However the licences are clear; these extensions are closed source.
VS Code's core editor functionality (Monaco, LSP, DAP, etc) is fully open, and has been regularly repurposed and re-branded by several other companies. I sincerely don't see the problem. If someone else wants to write their own extensions, they are free to; these extensions are Microsoft's IP and hence Microsoft is free to do what it wants with its IP.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools?tab=License-1-o...
In reality, it's a MIT-licensed wrapper. The real license is also included in the repository, just not the top level github license.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/blob/main/Runti...
The disingenuity is what you are condoning. The repo is superficially organized to appear open-source but is actually a minefield.
Github will sometimes say "found other licenses"; the best Github can do is to "report" on the state of a repository; it's up to the community to decide on stricter tolerances for declaring something to be open-source, because as we see here, even a major corporation is willing to engage in subterfuge/exploitation.
Saying something is "open source" provides material benefit: it creates attention, it attracts users, it creates community. Shouldn't a project be fully in-the-spirit of open source to benefit?
There's plenty of case law around the word "free"; it's just too early for the phrase "open source" to have settled case law.
They have nothing on gamers.
The same is true for the adage about boiling frogs, but it's still a useful analogy.
Hmm? I mean maybe some people believe this, but I have never heard of anyone thinking the epidemic that affected hundreds of thousands of Natives was caused by blankets. The Natives I know are well aware that it was a specific event and most Smallpox infections were caused by general contact with Europeans.
In fact, the commenter doesn't even do this, they just referenced the siege and then YOU conflated it with hundreds of thousands of deaths. Officials did intentionally infect Natives and the article confirms that, so I don't think merely referencing that fact is spreading a myth?
But yes, it is melodramatic and tasteless.
Or more likely, "the free version will now contain ads and mandatory telemetry, pay to upgrade to premium for a more streamlined experience". Just like the Mafia, create the problem then sell your their solution.
Edit: OTOH reporting on this as if it's a grand surprise is a bit funny. Like come on, this was obvious from the start. I just didn't care, it didn't feel like a fight worth fighting. And I care about BSD/MIT license devs being exploited about as much as MS' business model potentially falling apart because I turn off telemetry: folks knew what they're going into, and did it anyway because "sempai corpo will notice us." Well, it did, congratulations.
As for me, I don't care. I ain't posting anything on anything lighter than AGPL, ever, but I'm a small bean and ultimately there's stuff I care about way more than software.