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.
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.
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...
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?
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 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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
Which is completely reasonable, you may need a different analogy.
If Microsoft were not be very willing to bear this cost, they would never have built a marketplace into VS Code.
If MSFT weren't willing to bear the cost, they wouldn't use the "app store" concept (marketplace) for VS Code.
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.
Seems to me this is plainly the community wanting its cake and to eat it too.
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?