> 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?

It's honestly quite a PR coup MS has been able to pull off in terms of pushing this "new microsoft" message.

In general it's always foolish to attribute altruistic intent to a corporation, and MS in particular given their history.

Even if we take this as true, and they only care about making WSL and related projects as a means to the end of acquiring more users/dollars… where is the bad news?

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.

> where is the bad news?

The bad news come when you reach the "Extinguish" phase. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Ask yourself this: would a public-facing ice cream shop run by Google, Microsoft or Facebook be content with just simply selling you ice cream?

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.

This isn’t really a counterpoint to what I’m saying.

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.

More importantly, if they are giving away free ice cream, what do you think they expect to gain in return?

Enterprise users whose employers pay money for support and management tooling.

I think this is all true. So we should be careful in the sense of not being vendor locked-in.

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.

The most important parts of VSCode aren't even in VSCode - it's the LSP.

> The most important parts of VSCode are not free software.

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 most important parts of VSCode are not free software. > What do you mean by this?

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...

While I agree that that shows MS doesn't really love open source as much as they say they do, I don't think you can really call those "The most important parts of VSCode".

For python development pylance is one of the most important parts.

Perhaps, but VSCode is used for a lot more than just python.

What's stopping you using any other LSP compatible python language server?

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)

Well there is Pyright by MS (that's what Pylance is based on) and python-language-server by MS - that one has been superseded by Pyright and is deprecated in Code.

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

The Microsoft C++ extension is also not fully open source.

Not sure what OP is referring to, but Microsoft has multiple Visual Studio Code extensions (e.g. Remote SSH) that are closed-source and hard-coded not to work with any self-compiled versions of Visual Studio Code.

Why was this downvoted? sneak brings up good points.

Microsoft draws a lot of water in this town, Lebowski.