I worry a lot less about Microsoft and tooling like VSCode than I would about anything developed by FAANG or god forbid Oracle.
That's not true at all.
The main problem with the whole MS/Mono/C# thing was that Microsoft was openly being hostile to FLOSS in general and Linux in particular, thus gained a well earn reputation of not being a trustable entity. Thus at the time adopting any technology churned by Microsoft was clearly a serious liability.
It's really sad that few developers used it, just like the Linux desktop is sad.
It wasn't but that's besides the point. Mono posed a serious risk because of how Microsoft's threatened all potential users of Mono due to all the loopholes in Microsoft's promises, along with Microsoft's lack of credibility.
https://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono
https://www.fsf.org/news/2009-07-mscp-mono
> People said that if you used Mono Microsoft would come after you. And nothing happened.
The people said the exact same thing about Oracle and Java, and here we are.
Just because you believe someone won't pull the trigger on you that doesn't mean it's a good idea to let them put a gun to your head.
That actually is the point. Mono was an independent implementation. And C#/.net was much less encumbered than 'open source and free, write once run anywhere' Java. Free as long as you aren't trying to embedded anything but one full stack implementation controlled by Sun. Otherwise you paid through the nose.
Consider as well the beloved Sun sued Microsoft for implementing their own compatible version of Java. And later Oracle tried to sue the pants off Google for just using Java based API's.
So the actual history disproves the conventional wisdom.
I didn't buy the argument then, and I don't buy it now. What's happened is that an area of software has evolved to the point that the profit from selling it outright has turned negative.
In the early 2000s Microsoft's cart was upended in a two-pronged attack. Apple developed the iPhone and Google developed Search. Both were entirely new platforms without any connection to Microsoft. Microsoft has tried and utterly failed to enter these markets.
That's what monopoly in software encourages - radically new platforms rather than incremental improvements to existing products.
With VS code, there's nothing to be done here. At some point a fundamentally new way to write software will take shape, and VS Code will fade into the background.