89 karma · joined January 25, 2016
Astronomer and physicist by training, now working in data science.
Other things I care about: my family, books, food, wine, coffee.
tl;dr is that we build a lot of extensions ourselves and are familiar with what you can/can't do with it. Our goals around a data science IDE require more fully integrated experience that isn't possible with the VS Code extension API.
We do use OpenVSX, yes, like the other forks, and our company is a major sponsor of OpenVSX. Security around the extension ecosystem is a pretty messy, complicated issue both for the proprietary Microsoft marketplace and OpenVSX. For example, the recent Amazon Q story! I currently think about it as conceptually fairly similar to the risks of using packages from PyPI or npm.
But we have some pretty big aspirations around expanding our SQL support, based on the features we have already built like that Connections pane, our Data Explorer, our Observable support via Quarto, etc. We plan to invest in this area over the coming months, starting in Q4 this year.
I would say that Positron is better for folks who use more than one language (not only R) or want to customize/extend their IDE in a way that is not possible in RStudio.
We talk a bit about why we chose the Elastic license here: https://positron.posit.co/licensing.html
We have thought pretty carefully about what kind of functionality works well in extensions (in fact, we build and maintain a number of extensions!) and came to the decision that the more integrated data science experience we wanted to make required forking.
tl;dr is that the desktop app (including remote SSH sessions) is free to use with a permissive license (no account needed, no subscription, commercial use is OK, etc), but using Positron in a server mode does require a paid subscription.