Microsoft is also one of the biggest gaming companies in the world (via the xbox platform) and zero initiative on free software anything over there.
Microsoft doesn't care at all about free software, or software freedoms. It's just a means to an end.
This is the conclusion that most people don't ever reach. They assume that there is an altruistic element to things like open source within Microsoft (and other commercial organisations) and perhaps among the developers there is... giving back, helping out and all that.
But if Microsoft (or Google, FB, etc. etc) thought for one second that supporting, nurturing and building open source software and tools was affecting the bottom line negatively they'd drop it in a heartbeat: they answer to the shareholders and they only have one question - will this make more money?
In general it's always foolish to attribute altruistic intent to a corporation, and MS in particular given their history.
The average ice cream shop exists to sell me ice cream, they’re not on an ideological quest to improve the craft. And I can eat their ice cream just fine, because I like ice cream.
The bad news come when you reach the "Extinguish" phase. [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Microsoft sells Windows, but they are not content with just simply selling you an OS. There's plenty of privacy violating data collection and ads in the OS.
Windows 10 has tons of stuff that I don’t like. But the advancements in WSL and open source are a good thing.
By all means, apply pressure to Microsoft for things that they do wrong, and for bad decisions they make. But when they’re doing a good thing, maybe the default stance shouldn’t be to speculate about ill intent. Sometimes it’s nice to just enjoy the good thing.
That said, this is also a legitimate interest. But what they did with the hot reload lately... I am not sure it is a smart move.
What do you mean by this?
The core IDE is all open source (except some closed source telemetry).
The common example I see quoted is that the super-old, legacy, C# debugger is closed source, but as far as I know there is nothing stopping people writing an alternative debugger for C# in VS Code. Jetbrains did it for Rider.
The SSH remote connection stuff, the Pylance Python LSP (you are not allowed to use it - the binary - in any other editor but VS Code, not even the OSS Codium) and some other extensions are CSS.
"""Can I load Pylance in Code – OSS? Pylance is licensed for use in Microsoft products and services only, so can only be used on official Microsoft builds of Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces."""
https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/blob/main/FAQ.m...
Is your argument that if Microsoft develop any programming tool and then allow it to be used via VS Code they must open source it?
Would you place that same requirement on other extensions? (e.g. sonarcloud)
https://github.com/microsoft/pyright https://github.com/Microsoft/python-language-server
The only(?) one not by MS is Jedi: https://github.com/pappasam/jedi-language-server
git clone
nix-shell
# get developing[1]: https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/tree/main/nix#working...
pg_tmp [1] also helps
A development environment and a production environment are inherently different in vast ways.
So even if your development environment is in the cloud, you still need a way to package your code and transfer to the environment similar to where it will run in production (whether it's bare metal, virtualized, container, or managed (e.g. serverless))
What the cloud providers are working on is making it easier and faster to continuously package transfer your development state to your prod environment.
But whether you're coding in a browser or locally it doesn't accelerate the deployment path.
1. Give away the Code Editor as Open source, but make important Plugins (Python Development, Live Share,...) closed source.
2. Make the life for developers easier/ more productive by integrating cloud offerings. Oh, you're starting a python project? Use our code space for development and click here to automatically deploy it to Azure, everything correctly configured. No need to deal with Ops.
3. Make $$$ with Cloud services and enterprise tooling.
I really regret those years lost.
That said, the situation with W10+WSL reminds me a bit of the early days around OS X when we suddenly had a consumer grade desktop Unix experience. W10+WSL is clunkier, but trending in a decent direction.
Most corps I worked at had a specific setup I was required to use, which was generally windows.
It's further down the lock-in road, and if big corps want those handcuffs, good luck to them.
I still think macOS is the most user friendly UNIX, though.
As for WSL, I really don't care about it, I have been using VMWare with Linux distributions for about 10 years now.
Where are those philosophers?
I would like to know where would Linux be without Intel, Compaq, IBM and Oracle's money that started being pumped around 2000.
Even Wikipedia mentions it.
What about the author’s point that VSCode competes too well with visual studio, and that MS has intentionally underfunded Omnisharp, and that their own software stack continues to be poorly supported on VSCode?
The large effort in VSCode seems poorly invested if it’s used to push people to a paid product like VSCode.
So their acquisition of Github and the large effort invested in VSCode as well as privileging their own software stack over competing solutions makes perfect sense, business wise. It probably won't be good for free software though.