Developers. Those are choices for developers, not their customers.
Their customers are still primarily enterprise/gov.
And the reason for giving choice and candy to the developers is to keep them onboard and happy to develop for the ecosystem, so that customers will continue to buy in as the ecosystem has what they need.
I'm not saying WSL or VS Code are evil. They make developing on Windows a joy. But they make it a joy with that goal in mind.
> It's because Visual Studio Code is a ramp to move the developer tooling ecosystem towards an end-to-end consumable services model of software development tools
> Microsoft can step in at any moment to create legal crises that strategically divide the market from a business perspective because like Apple and their AppStore: it is their ecosystem that they control and they are in absolute control
> Microsoft can easily fork open-source communities by changing towards proprietary defaults ("strategically divide the market") as Microsoft has already done twice so far. The way Microsoft forks open-source communities is by releasing Visual Studio Code extension updates that make their proprietary offering the default once they have managed to capture enough adoption...
More diversity amongst editors is important. Given Microsoft’s track record of EEE, one wonders what they can do with vscode. Maybe one day it will only support GitHub, maybe code sharing gets picked up and is only available on vscode, forcing you to use it because everyone else.
It’s never a good thing that Microsoft has majority market share.
I'm a developer and I hate closed proprietary ecosystems with a passion, so that was just lip service afaic. Current microsoft is much more "developers developers developers"
The Visual Studio Code thing is kind of a shame. It seems like a variant of "embrace, extend, extinguish" inasmuch as things like Atom exist (which microsoft also owns, womp womp, but didn't for 3 years after Atom started). It competes in the space, keeps competitors weak by being the best so that it gets all of the users and mind-share and resources, but doesn't go all of the way with them because it could compete with their proprietary products...so while being the best is a good thing, it's not a good thing when it creates a monopoly-like product in a space good enough to suck up landscape resources so that no viable competitors not under Microsoft's thumb could ever start approaching parity with their proprietary products.
Definitely dents Microsoft's nascent open-source credit with me and, like so much of Microsoft's history, seems actively damaging in a monumental way to the history of computing itself for Microsoft's benefit.
Even developers are taken for a ride. Just like WhatsApp and Chrome, it all comes down to ripple effects of "If others didn't use it, I can't". I have given a number of examples of this stubborn sticky monopoly below.
Every newbie while learning to code: scared of reviews on internet like "I couldn't get help with this editor online or with colleagues and I can't risk being stuck on this project so I switched to VS Code"
Every newbie while interviewing: impress interviewers even by a little chance that they use the "industry standard" tool to code.
Every experienced developer, even on this HN post, says "It doesn't have excellent support like VS CODE, in remote development, centralized marketplace, etc."
I have pieced together and my conclusion comes from the observation below. There is a reason enterprise, rather than startup world use M$ products. The power and money to fight for fairness.
Their C#/.NET compiler is open source and excellently designed but with a secret tunnel to nefarious practices to use when needed[ like closed source]
VSCODE is open source but with a secret tunnel to nefarious practices to use when needed[ like telemetry and extensions where the real power lies, being closed source]
Phone and App market but to with a secret tunnel to nefarious practices to use when needed[ it is going to be based on android like Edge on Chromium]
VStudio is best IDE but to with a secret tunnel to nefarious practices to use when needed[ like telemetry + closed source extensions + Heavy + slow + whatnot!]
MAUI is Wowza! tool with a secret tunnel to nefarious practices to use when needed[ like repackage old Xamarin in new branding]
OneNote is the best note taking app ever but with a secret tunnel to nefarious practices to use when needed[ like lock in using obscure format and closed source]
Every company they acquire but with a secret tunnel to nefarious practices to use when needed[ Embraaace Exteeend Extin...]
Basically microsoft is trying to crush ide makers. To achieve that its leveraging unpaid work. I dont know how someone can celebrate tools such as VSCode that despite being free are clearly products made by a corporation so large that it can crush legitimate businesses. Its not jetbrains trying to fight back vscode. Its jetbrains fighting back microsoft by providing not just good tools but also pay to those that want to build such good tools.
There’s a large conflict of interest when Visual Studio is a paid commercial product, while VS Code is free yet gaining marketshare even in C#/C++ work. When someone is willing to sacrifice the OSS-licensed product (even after the feature was already coded[0]), it shows Microsoft’s true colors in that they “embrace OSS” only to the extent select teams at MS choose too; the culture isn’t one that puts OSS first over sales.
i think it extends further than that, since they have: vscode, github, linkedin, npm, typescript, chatgpt. for many, this is almost the entire developer ecosystem.
at a high level they pretend to embrace open source but many of the best features of vscode are closed source, such as remote editing and various language servers (pylance, etc.) the lsp saga is particularly unfriendly, since they pushed it as an open standard, tons of people contributed and adopted it, and then they closed the source to their most valuable language servers, making them only compatible with their product (vscode).
there are countless similar examples. the way i see microsoft and the way they want to be perceived are entirely different.
I do not think Visual Studio is an example that supports your argument.
I haven't spelled its license recently, but the native code compilers are intended to keep authors locked into Microsoft's ecosystem. Whether that is more or less artificially then this product, I would not know.
Having said that, I agree that this is part of a strategy that is designed to corner a market. Some people would phrase that as "good old capitalism at work", though. I agree with them, except for that "good" adjective.
I saw it as Microsoft's signalling that they care more about being in the good graces of the wider developer community than about dominating the programming editor/IDE market. After all VSCode is free. I'd argue that giving away VSCode, LSP, Monaco (the base editor) and so on has been a successful means of redeeming their brand in the eyes of developers and really anyone who ever touches code. That could backfire if they took on an aggressively competitive stance. Letting LSP play nicely with other editors seems therefore good business for them. It also appears that as a profitable business, money Microsoft spends on VSCode might otherwise be spent as taxes?
Lots of people have pointed out how entitled this article is. There's another problem with this article.
The author assumes that his plans for the future are in alignment with or superior to the vision of the authors / ip owners of Sublime.
There's plenty of room for great free and open source tools and great proprietary development tools. Always has been... Emacs, Eclipse and VS Code haven't killed off the paid IDEs. Sublime's niche has a long tradition of paid and free tools. What is good is that Sublime has found a way to survive, and hopefully prosper. That should be celebrated... and maybe the lesson is why they are able to survive in spite of great free competition. (this also applies to JetBrains, WingIDE and many other commercial development tools, all of which are great values for developers)
Honestly, I don't see competing with VS Code as much of a goal: it takes a world-beating development effort, and you will likely not have a self-sustaining organization in the end. For Microsoft, they get a way to distribute Copilot, Azure, Github and proprietary add-ons. For a smaller company, you may not have a way to create a sustainable team to maintain the product.
Personally, I wouldn't actually care if Visual Studio Code was completely proprietary with zero open source element. I think the imagined consequences tend to mostly be not that significant for the vast majority of people, at most it would be a blip in the timeline as people switch to something else. The actual consequence (as implied by this article) seems to be people who build their business around these tools, they are entering a particular ecosystem backed by a large corporate and they are leveraging on the big corporates ability to make that ecosystem popular. That kind of is what it is. Pros and Cons.
They want you to stay in the Microsoft ecosystem is why they made an open source IDE and great tooling for it that competes directly with an IDE they sell for up to 1000$/seat/year that actually tries to get you to stay in their ecosystem with things like free Azure credits, preferential Azure pricing, free Windows Server and MSSQL licenses
Not that I think any of this is not entirely tangential to the original point...
Almost the entire thread seems like a case of "give them a finger and they'll take the whole hand"
Microsoft is a profit driven business, it never committed to open-sourcing every piece of software it writes, of course they're trying to somehow make money with VSCode, because it costs money to develop it.
If you don't like it choose another one of the billion text editors and IDEs that exist or write a competitive language server, but nobody 'lured you in' or is extinguishing anyone.
As I have said it on the original GitHub issue, there are multiple reasons for why the lives of .NET developers will always suck.
First of all every division at Microsoft needs to be cash positive. At DevDiv (developer devision) the main bread maker is Visual Studio. .NET is free and makes no money. VS Code is free and makes no money. OmniSharp is/was free and made no money. ASP.NET is free and makes no money. It's mostly SQL and Visual Studio licenses which pay the salaries of the .NET team. For that reason Microsoft can never let it happen that a free and open .NET extension can make VS Code a good enough experience for the vast majority of .NET developers. It's not by accident that despite Microsoft owning C#, .NET, VS Code and OmniSharp the C# experience on VS Code was the worst of its kind in comparison to any other programming language. It's by choice in order to push developers to use Visual Studio.
Another big reason is that Microsoft needs to keep a tight grip around their .NET developers, because .NET is the main driver to Azure adoption. Azure is an extremely unattractive product to any other development community. Azure is slow, it breaks, it over promises and under delivers and it is almost twice as expensive to AWS or GCP once you actually establish feature parity. It's mainly .NET devs who get cleverly pushed to Azure and siloed away from anything non-Microsoft by Microsoft. The world runs in the cloud nowadays and the cloud is a unix based environment. Microsoft has felt the bleed of its traditional Windows centric developer base migrating away to macOS and Linux and becoming more wise about their technology choices. In order to stop the bleed Microsoft tries hard to convince its remaining Windows developers to remain in the Windows/Azure silo by giving them just enough sugar coating so they never step outside. WSL, the new unix-like terminal in Windows, Windows containers, etc. are all attempts to keep Windows folks on Windows and therefore closer to Azure.
The irony with all of this is of course that if you are a software developer, you'll have a MUCH MUCH better experience with Microsoft owned products (GitHub, VS Code, etc.) if you choose any programming language which is NOT .NET, because (at least for now) they will not try to come after you to lock you into their Windows/Azure based silo.
Visual Studio, although apparently beloved, is just an IDE.
Look at the rise of consoles, look at this thread.
See the talk of there not being 'standards' on Linux and consider the biggest way the Linux community gets around that: Open Source codebases that rely on users who are also devs to help fix things up and get them working everywhere.
Linux isn't an ideal 'uniform consumption device', so it's not an appealing target. Now it's starting to get some love because people are looking around and asking 'What about freedom?'.
GitHub? fair
OpenAI? how is this a part of dev. ecosystem?
Vs Code? wtf? there's a lot of other IDEs/editors and many would argue that they are better
>embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with WSL
They are EEEing their product - Windows?
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