Microsoft did promote it, at least in its early days, as an open and standard system, and the LSP as a way to go from MxN language specific IDE implementations to M+N. But tben, they make it 2xM+N by forbidding the use of their LSPs in other editors - which, if done by everyone would put as back at MxN.

This is hypocritical behavior, and it does remind people of EE&E which was Microsoft’s explicit policy in the past. It’s not an exact repeat, but it does seem to rhyme.

> by forbidding the use of their LSPs in other editors

How can they prevent my, let’s say vim, client from connecting to a closed-source server if they both speak the same protocol?

As pritambaral mentioned, they can make some minor changes to the server that are just enough to cause the client to no longer work.

This isn't exactly unheard of when it comes to Microsoft. I mean, you don't have to go far to find an example of them doing exactly that -- there's prime example [0] right here in this thread!

(Alsa known as "extend"; see also "Active Directory")

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[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719294

One way would be to make the closed-source server speak mostly-but-not-quite-the-same protocol.

Other servers like clangd have documented extensions, but I see your point. I’m glad the protocol is discussed and developed in the open - I think it’s really helped the IDE story in other editors.

They did here by pushing LSP as a standard. Actually, LSP allows for closed source extensions that are generally useful: they have specially prevented that from happening here. There may be the usual “but it’s not open source” complaints here if they did that, but I suspect that people were mostly interested in the source so they could build their own version that they could use elsewhere more than that they actually wanted the code for something.

I am glad they did. LSP is eons better then stuff we had before.

And nobody here is arguing "LSP is bad". They're instead criticising the duplicity of proposing and promulgating an open "standard" that LSP is supposed to be, and then breaking that practice.

Agreed. Microsoft has released tons of open-source work. They're not obligated to do so for every product they develop.

There's likely more complex licensing restrictions on some of their products. They even allude to this in their answer.

You are absolutely right, but this thread's point is exactly to highlight this fact. That if you'll commit to learning and depending this toolkit, you might want to understand that Microsoft is in control and depending on its mood may decide to carve up some parts of this OSS editor and ship it to proprietary land.

Their marketing or their disciples don't really spell it out when recommending it for obvious reasons.

I thought the new monetisation ideology of New Microsoft was "push to Azure", and that they don't necessarily have to monetise specific products as long as you're kept in the ecosystem whose funnel is the aforementioned. Thoughts?

There is no singular monetisation strategy in Microsoft, it’s a bit more complicated than “all in on Azure”.

Exactly, do not expect a business (except it is a non-profit) to do something out of charity - they don't.