Wasn’t there recently a thread were Microsoft interviewed someone that has a third party dev tool, declined to hire him and then recreated the same tool with almost the same name without acknowledgement?

You mean the app that he named almost the same name as another, long-existing Microsoft product? (NuGet) It's not like AppGet was developed in a vacuum. And it's definitely nowhere near the situation like Facebook cloning Virtual Desktop, threatening to crush the original developer if he didn't join them, and naming it the exact same thing.

Right, but they would. Plugins aren't paid right now, so all I'd think it would take would be Microsoft saying "hey, people like your plugin, we'll pay you to maintain it, and if you don't want to maintain it, we'll inhouse it."

To avoid left-pad situations

I don't know about VS Code, but in native VS, there are lots of paid plugins. There just isn't a store. You buy the plugins from the developers.

It's all open source. Is there anyone making money from VS Code plugins? Why does it matter if MS "steals" the code?

>Unlike the FANG companies, Microsoft doesn't tend to rip the carpet out from under independent developers like that.

No, they roll them into the carpet and sodomize them like they did with Keivan Beigi and at most just sheepishly say sorry after some public outcry.