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Comment by throw4950sh06 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> VSCode is provided fully free as in beer and freedom

No, VSCode is a proprietary text editor/IDE from Microsoft. Code-OSS is provided fully free as in beer and freedom, and is currently what resides at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode.

Why would Microsoft not want other AI agent extensions to get the same benefits, which would benefit all AI agent users?

Edit: I have removed the portion of the comment which discussed the throwaway account.

Does throwaway account negates the arguments though?

I think there can be an inherent bias to the argument which should be known, and not hidden away. Nevertheless, I removed that portion of the comment.

Either way, no, a fork is not simple because forks cannot access the VSCode Marketplace.

Exactly. That's what Cursor did, and (I think) Microsoft will agree with that and maybe even welcome developers to do this.

Has Microsoft allowed Cursor to access the VSCode Marketplace? As far as I know, it is against the ToS for any editor other than VSCode to access it.

Probably not. Please suggest to extension authors to dual-publish their extensions to OpenVSX and VSMarketplace. So far all authors I engaged with were happy do to so (except for Microsoft of course, who are the only benefactor of this wallet garden situation).

I find that many of the extensions I use do dual publish. I also dual publish my own extension for people because walled gardens are not cool.

I also have an extension that I dual publish. I was surprised to see it’s getting as many downloads on OpenVSX as on the VSCode marketplace. I’m just glad it’s useful to more people for marginally no cost.

I think Cursor just mirrors the VSCode marketplace on their own servers. They used to have an ugly work around for installing extensions, but now it just works and I see links to https://marketplace.cursorapi.com/ inside of Cursor's extension browser.

Any idea how they got the data? I would imagine that just downloading all the data is also against the ToS.

> I would imagine that just downloading all the data is also against the ToS.

It is.

I use both vsc and cursor, cursor imported automatically all my vsc extensions and settings and theme and everything.

Fortunately most ToS are not legally enforceable, but only amount to a public statement of "we are threatening to block your IP if you do this"

There's an entire mechanism to build custom VSCode based applications right there ready to be used. They did more than could be expected.

Eh not quite. Famously, you can fork VSCode, but you can't use the VSCode Extension Marketplace if you do, which loses a lot of the network effect benefits of the VSCode ecosystem. (As far as I know Cursor is flat out violating Microsoft's terms of service with respect to the extension marketplace).

And a lot of the licenses for flagship Microsoft VSCode extensions for languages like C/C++ and Python don't allow using them outside of VSCode/Extension Marketplace so open source forks are crippled by default.

I believe this also blocks you from using Microsoft's proprietary language extensions, and they have been steadily switching the default language packages from OSS to proprietary.

Yes. You famously cannot use the C/C++ language server bundled in the C/C++ extension or Pylance. Who knows what other development tools they will lock behind their fork to the detriment of open source communities. Also you can't use their Remote Extension suite.

Correct

OpenVSX. Again this is just the same as RHEL repos behind license login.

Red Hat provides support for their packages. If you're not paying for support, you don't get access to the repos. That makes sense to me. What does Microsoft gain by creating a walled garden? They don't provide support. All that they provide is hosting. The Eclipse Foundation provides hosting for free for OpenVSX, which is an amazing service to the community of people using VSCode forks that aren't allowed to access the VSCode Marketplace. Microsoft should either relax the ToS on the Marketplace or acknowledge OpenVSX as the one and only marketplace for extensions.

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