Why would Microsoft give away their crown jewels to a competing IDE? They spent ages perfecting their debugger.

It's not like JetBrains can't build their own debugger based on the ICorDebug interface (which is what Microsoft's implementation is also based on).

Nobody here is claiming proprietary code is inherently bad (some people definitely do, but not in this thread), they're just saying it makes a poor example of Microsoft embracing open source.

JetBrains products aren't Open Source. So how is embracing a closed source for-profit company anything to do with embracing Open Source?

You're asking why releasing an open source debugger has anything to do with embracing open source because there are closed source companies that are also making a debugger?

> You're asking why releasing an open source debugger has anything to do with embracing open source

I don't even understand what that means. It was never Open Source, it was part of the IDE(s). Microsoft released an update package for their IDE(s) on NuGet which JetBrains used before their native debugger was ready.

If Microsoft are to be shamed for keeping their IDE's debugger closed source then JetBrains should be equally shamed, both have closed source proprietary IDEs.

> how is embracing a closed source for-profit company anything to do with embracing Open Source?

Truly embracing open-source with .NET core would mean that, yes, even a proprietary product could make use of it. A debugger is extremely core to having a language being open-source and artificially limiting it to your own products is the exact opposite of 'embrace'

Also, JetBrains does have an open-source debugger in their community versions, but this is not what the debate is about.

By that token Richard Stalman doesn't embrace open source. The Linux kernel isn't open source. Anything that is GPL is not open source, because you can't make proprietary code from GPL code.

GPL spells this out and gives you the source, if requested. It does not make any restrictions as to on what platform you can use it or anything like that. Microsoft released .NET Core under a permissive license which does allow integration with proprietary code and then specifically limited use of the debugger to their own products. Even other open-source projects, beside VS Code, cannot use the debugger. That is everything that the GPL is not.

This is like if Stallman released Emacs under the GPL, but kept the Elisp interpreter proprietary.

My problem is; if you're going to pretend to embrace open-source and then limit a core component this arbitrarily, you're not embracing open-source, you're still the old org afraid of competition.

My understanding is that the debugger is an adapted version of the closed source Visual Studio debugger. Visual Studio isn't open source, and is a paid for product.

It takes time to break things out from inside a larger closed source project...

Some editions are, I suppose. For many things VS Community is free though.

I don't think any editions of Visual Studio are available as Open Source software. The Community thingie is gratis but doesn't come with source code.

There's VSCode (is that OSS?) but that's not an edition of VS but rather a whole different product.

VSCode is absolutely OSS.