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Comment by dumbo-octopus | Hacker News Reader

Software engineers have to be the most melodramatic lot in existence. Microsoft: you can use this product for your development work freely, but we have licensing in place that prevents redistribution that cuts out our core product offering because let’s be real here this is really expensive to develop and both us and our employees have bills to pay just like anyone else.

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)

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> let’s be real here this is really expensive to develop and both us and our employees have bills to pay just like anyone else

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.

i don't care. if you don't want to write free software, that's fine with me. but don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining, and don't offer me a gift and then demand payment

> but don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining, and don't tell me it's a gift and then demand payment

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.

It's just disingenuous for Microsoft to say, for example, the cpptools extension is MIT licensed, which it is.

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.

Where has microsoft stated the cpp extension is MIT licensed?

(assuming you haven’t somehow looked at a block of legal text, disregarded the opening paragraph, and assumed the rest of it somehow is to be interpreted in isolation?)

> Software engineers have to be the most melodramatic lot in existence.

They have nothing on gamers.

>a story which, ironically, turns out to be almost entirely fabricated

The same is true for the adage about boiling frogs, but it's still a useful analogy.

> 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

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.

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