It is an interesting position we find ourselves in and we had some lively discussions about it! I would like to note, though, that Monaco (which powers our current Web IDE) is ALSO a Microsoft project. So this isn't a change in strategy as it relates to using open source projects maintained by those that may be seen as competitors.
We have faith in the future of VS Code as an open source project but I'll also say that this isn't a one-way door. If things change in the future, we're not so heavily leveraged that we couldn't replace the Web IDE's underlying editor again.
The issue is that there’s no money to be made duplicating the effort that has gone into VS Code when VS Code is open source. Even Google doesn’t seem to care about entering that space.
I would argue that the best thing to come out of VS Code isn't even "VS Code" the overall environment, it's LSP [0], and MS has given that back to the community such that anybody can use it in a competing editor. I don't really think "VS Code" the product has a "moat" here and (up to now, at least) MS hasn't demonstrated much intent on creating one.
On a personal note I've tried using VS Code many times, but although the features look nice, I find the UI too alien. Luckily, vim has plugins to use LSP, so I can have all of the features I want in my existing editor.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft's moats here are things like Teams, Live Share, and Remote. If anyone has or is working on open source implementations that can be installed into the open source version, I'm sure there would be widespread interest.
And yet they failed. Remember Atom[1] or Brackets[2]? I'm sure they are still used by a lot of people. But it was interesting to see Microsoft grow VS Code so fast in popularity. My vague notion is that addressing developer pain points early and providing first party plugins for popular ecosystems gave them an edge.
I don't know if it's possible to get the performance you need to make an IDE/text editor feel snappy in most situations with a pure DOM solution.
Remote development environments are becoming a thing. I've not really had a chance to explore this space a lot but I might.
At GitLab, there are open roles for "Server Runtime" in the incubation engineering team [1] [2] in case someone is interested in joining and building this together :)
[0] https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1400134840754733059
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/#op...
In 10 years Google regret not buying Github.
They regretted it the day it was announced.
We have considered Theia in the past. Here are a couple of related epics/issues:
And Azure DevOps which is competing in the same corporate segment where gitlab might otherwise make some money.
> Next, we asked ourselves the question: Do we want to continue to invest in implementing custom features for the Web IDE that ultimately deliver the same value as those already available in VS Code? Or do we embrace VS Code inside GitLab, and invest in extending the experience to more tightly integrate with GitLab and the DevOps workflow?
I feel like if asking myself those questions I'd have come to the same answer, but it's certainly an interesting position. It's not necessarily that I think Microsoft will leverage this open-source project against GitLab. Maybe it just says something about Microsoft's increasingly-dominant position in developer tooling.