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Comment by grobbyy | Hacker News Reader

Terms of service often contain illegal provisions. I teach kids to flout them too. One of the biggest sins in school is kids learn to follow rules uncritically.

There are specific protections allowed when the goal is to maintain / break compatibility. If Microsoft locks competitors out, competitors are quite often permitted to pick the lock.

I can't comment on this situation since I don't know the details, but it's very likely this is fully legal.

See Oracle / Java API lawsuit, garage door opener suit, etc. To see where the lines sit.

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I think your analogies are wrong.

There is a direct cost to Microsoft that these companies are pushing on them. Specifically around bandwidth.

Microsoft does not need to provide access for downloading plugins from their servers to anyone else.

I am quite confident that the bandwidth cost is absolutely not a concern for Microsoft, and that the obvious goal is for them to capture the market.

The "C/C++" extension github repository is 4MB. Probably the download size for the extension itself is a fraction of that, but I won't bother measuring. It was downloaded 400 times over the last minute (there is a live counter on the extension page [0]).

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

That's a 25MB/s or 200Mb/s bandwidth, for one of the most popular extensions. Multiply by the top 10 extensions and you get the bandwidth of an average home optic fiber connection...

I am glad you have insider knowledge to be so confident. I would rather those costs go towards furthering VS Code than helping out Cursor. This comes from someone who uses Cursor and not the biggest fan of MSFT.

Pure speculation but I would see the more logical argument being Cursor is a for pay product, why should they have access to the marketplace?

> why should they have access to the marketplace

Because MS didn’t write most of the extensions yet engineered things conveniently such that you have to use their service to get them. Other text editors somehow manage to not lock people into similar dilemmas. They’re not profiting from running the marketplace or providing VS Code for free, it’s about locking people into a product. Cursor should be allowed access because interoperability is a societal net-benefit.

> those costs

…are likely minescule. I run similar services at my day job, just at a much larger scale than a text editor app marketplace, and know the precise cost to run everything. I am often disturbed that people might actually think cost:revenue is tight enough that they should defend a behemoth about callously gating access to it.

> I am often disturbed that people might actually think cost:revenue is tight enough that they should defend a behemoth about callously gating access to it.

I think it's more likely that they imagine themselves in Microsoft's shoes. After all, it's a very popular editor and the mechanism of vendor lock-in is clever - give away the editor under the noble banner of open source, while jealously gate access to the plugin ecosystem that makes the editor as useful as it is.

So no, I don't think they earnestly believe that the egress costs are anything more than pocket change. But it's almost certainly what they would argue if they were in Microsoft's position.

People on HN are conditioned by massively inflated cloud egress prices

Ehhh everything is purely speculation on everyone’s part. Again I don’t think your argument holds up to much.

Couldn’t it wind up being easy for Cursor and other variants of VS Code to be long run beneficial for VS Code itself? Seems like having a different third party team extending your stuff and testing it, could be hugely valuable, they take risks and move fast, the upstream project gradually learns from what works for the forks, people contribute various other new extensions.

In the age of LLMs, community is worth its weight in platinum, cutting off Cursor just incentivizes them to develop some new better thing with better technology (cough Zed, Ghostty) to compete with VS Code which won’t benefit Microsoft because it’ll be separate. What’s the use in not just open sourcing the C extension? With more people moving off C anyway, might as well get the free community contributions

MSFT want to build their own Cursor aka Copilot Agent.

They can build a better product with their resources effectively extinguishing Cursor, who will then need to find a way to differentiate.

If Cursor was smart, they would have decoupled from the beginning as they had first mover advantage. They will now have to adapt while fending off competition from MSFT and the other players.

MSFT meanwhile, have discovered that this market is too profitable to be left untouched. They have probably been building their agent for a while and have now decided to launch while simultaneously blocking direct competition. They already have an ecosystem with users who have switching inertia. It's a brilliant yet ruthless move.

Cursor is a small team, MS is a titanic enterprise. I highly doubt that Cursor could exceed MS when their entire product is built on VSCode in the first place and they can't even seem to describe their usage policies to their paying users.

Aren't you curious how 4MB of typescript can parse and understand C++ code? It doesn't. It downloads an additional 200MB binary language server that does all the work.

It is a public website and a public service - it's like saying "hey I got free lemonade here, but you can't have it unless I decide I like you first."

If you're giving something away online for free, then you are giving it away for free. I'll never understand the cognitive dissonance of "conditionally free".

A more important question is where do we draw the line of abuse? If someone links to my website and that's okay with me, but someone else does and I don't like it, do I have the right to conditionally block access to them? And do they have the right to circumvent that to regain access that I freely give to others?

"Bathroom for customers only" is a completely reasonable ask from a business owner, and is what Microsoft is doing here.

That usually means bathroom access is included in the price of buying something. VS Code is free as in free beer.

Unless said beer contains numerous nanoprobes that phone home every measurement detail about your insides while they traverse your intestinal tract, the beer is a lot freer than vscode.

> I'll never understand the cognitive dissonance of "conditionally free".

it's not a cognitive dissonance. Lots of places have conditionally free stuff - it's a form of price discrimination (coupons, special deals etc).

Microsoft is within their rights to make their servers conditionally free. What the community can respond with is to move to a different server, if such conditions are not within the bounds of the community's lines.

>it's like saying "hey I got free lemonade here, but you can't have it unless I decide I like you first."

Which is completely reasonable, you may need a different analogy.

> I'll never understand the cognitive dissonance of "conditionally free"

I don't think I understand. You don't understand how something can only sometimes be free? Like, free parking only on weekends? Free entry for young children? And free software depending on who you are and what you are going to do with it?

> There is a direct cost to Microsoft that these companies are pushing on them. Specifically around bandwidth.

If Microsoft were not be very willing to bear this cost, they would never have built a marketplace into VS Code.

I don’t understand this argument. So because MSFT is large and has healthy margins they should eat the cost?

> So because MSFT is large and has healthy margins they should eat the cost?

If MSFT weren't willing to bear the cost, they wouldn't use the "app store" concept (marketplace) for VS Code.

I don’t understand this line of thinking. Because they run a marketplace for Vs code they should also support paywalled forks?

> Because they run a marketplace for Vs code they should also support paywalled forks?

Since, because of the marketplace, MSFT (somewhat) "monopolized" the access to extensions, they should not block other applications (forks) that also attempt to access the marketplace.

Those quotes around monopolized are really doing some heavy lifting considering that it is utterly trivial to use alternative marketplaces on (edit: flavors of) VS Code.

Seems to me this is plainly the community wanting its cake and to eat it too.

Why does Microsoft have the right to cause users unrestricted bandwidth use through updates and ads and spying? That's a real cost Microsoft is forcing onto users.

If bandwidth is so precious, why isn't Microsoft paying users for the bandwidth they use pushing ads to their PC? Why isn't it considered onerous for them to foist tens of gigabytes in updates every week? This is a direct cost to consumers that Microsoft is pushing on them. Do you think that's fair? Or do you want to admit that your entire premise and argument is nonsense corporate apologism?

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