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Comment by BrentOzar | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time getting excited about this when they have such an atrocious record of handling pull requests in VS Code already: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pulls

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It looks to me like they close nearly 30 PRs every day. That's kind of amazing.

I'm no fan of Microsoft but that's a massive maintenance burden. They must have multiple people working on this full time.

If you examine the merged PR's - the overwhelming majority are from Microsoft employees. Meanwhile, community contributions sit and rot.

I thought they just open sourced this? Was there enough time to start reviewing community contributions?

How would I be able to examine the PRs to verify this?

Look at the first comment in the PR, it will have a badge "This user is a member of the Microsoft organization". Alternatively, look at the release notes on the website, any non-Microsoft contributions are listed at the bottom.

Right, but how to do that for thousands of PRs to see that there's a bias? I assume it's a ton of work.

Why not sample 20 and see if you can spot a trend?

Because I studied statistics.

You can get the JSON from like,

gh pr list --repo microsoft/vscode --state merged --limit 1000 --json author,mergedAt,title

Then you can do:

And see there's only 63 authors and > 90% of the merged PRs are from Microsoft (which.. fair, it's their product).

I think the signal is strong enough that you can legitimately reach the same conclusion by mk 1 eyeball.

NOTE: I'm not criticising, it's a Microsoft-driven project and I am fine with that. The _do_ merge things from "random" contributors (yay) but they are overwhelmingly things that a) fix a bug while b) being less than 5 lines of code. If that is your desired contribution then things will go well for you and arguably they do well at accepting such. But they are very unlikely to accept a complex or interesting new feature from an outsider. All of this is seems totally reasonable and expected.

There aren't that many Microsoft employees, it took me a couple minutes to memorize the team.

Of course the majority are from Microsoft, they do seem to merge in a fair amount of PRs from the community though.

Yet the Settings UI is still a nonsensical mess.

How is it a nonsensical mess? It’s clean, searchable, allows to fallback to json..

I get it might not be perfect, but "nonsensical mess" is maybe in bad faith here.

Valid question. There's some area where the text of the setting's state is the opposite of what the checkbox shows. I'll try to dig up a screen shot.

Historically, setting syntax colors has sucked too, but I don't remember the current state of that.

That's because it's Microsoft's Trademarked version of Open Source.

All the good FOSS vibes, without any of the hard FOSS work...

I hate this analogy. Just because something is open source, doesn’t mean it is forced to commit or comment on every pull request which takes development time. If that notion really bothers you, you are free to fork VSCode and close all 600 pull requests on your fork.

It's a common theme across most (all?) Microsoft "Open Source" repos. They publish the codebase on Github (which implies a certain thing on it's own), but accept very little community input/contributions - if any.

These repo's will usually have half a dozen or more Microsoft Employees with "Project Manager" titles and the like - extremely "top heavy". All development, decision making, roadmap and more are done behind closed doors. PR's go dormant for months or years... Issues get some sort of cursory "thanks for the input" response from a PM... then crickets.

I'm not arguing all open source needs to be a community and accept contributions. But let's be honest - this is deliberate on Microsoft's part. They want the "good vibes" of being open source friendly - but corporate Microsoft still isn't ready to embrace open source. ie, it's fake open source.

f. o. r. k. everything costs money, waaaay more than a $5 buy me a coffee. Every PR MS closes costs them thousands of dollars.

I've looked at a bunch of the popular JS libraries I depend on and they are all the same story, hundreds of open PRs. I think it's just difficult to review work from random people who may not be implementing changes the right way at all. Same with the project direction/roadmap, I'd say the majority of open source repos are like that. People will suggest ideas/direction all day and you can't listen to everyone.

Not sure for VSCode, but for .NET 9 they claim: "There were over 26,000 contributions from over 9,000 community members! "

Why is that bad? Seems like a perfectly valid approach for an Open Source project, SQLite is doing the same.

Agree. OSS is hard work and not obligatory.

Out of Apple, Google, and Microsoft, Microsoft is _by far_ the most active and open to open source and contributions.

I'm not sure I see the problem. The number of merged PR's looks on the high side for a FOSS project.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclo...

I've had a lot of PRs merged. If you don't create an issue or the issue already says it doesn't suit their vision then it won't get merged. It also helps to update the PR in November/December, even if there are no merge conflicts, as that's when they "clean up" and try to close as many as possible.

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