> Microsoft is the enemy

This made me smile, sadly. I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL and the apparent goodwill about open source. Some people and I, who lived through all of Microsoft, were skeptical and believed that it was only another embrace phase of their EEE pattern. I'm not sure if they are extinguishing something but it turns out that they are squeezing money out of the pockets of their users now.

Microsoft is big, internally incoherent (even inimical, according to some accounts), and people responsible for VSCode and WSL are likely totally unrelated to people determining when and how to crack MS's crown jewel, the Office suite, in an attempt to squeeze out a few dollars more.

That's why anything that goes against the long-established corporate culture aren't likely to stay around for long.

Visual Studio Code has been around over a decade and there is zero indication it's going anywhere.

Apart from academics, who are forced to stay away from ai, i feel vs code will regress to a code reader as the models improve.

Why are we acting like VS Code is nothing but a way to stop independent developers from selling their tools? Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades.

MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for several decades and if luck we with us indefinitely.

> Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades.

VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.

> MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company

I'm pretty sure that all of those (aside from Xbox) are profitable on their own, so I don't think that them becoming independent would kneecap them at all.

> VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.

Why not? That’s 11 years, times (say) 5 potential independent editors or IDE that didn’t exist because of VSCode in that time is over 50 years worth of software innovation.

How does the existence of VSCode stop the creation of other editors? The existence of other editors clearly didn't prevent VSCode from being created, so what's different?

Oh easy, you can't compete with a trillion dollar corporation that can subsidize loss leaders. We know there is a substantial market in this space if Zed is able to raised $30mil, but only letting VC or big tech dictate the direction of tooling is extremely troublesome.

I, along with every other person in tech I know, would love to start a company but the biggest risk is lack of health insurance; which is why things like medicare for all are sorely needed if we want to improve the space by introducing more competition.

Which is why you also need to specifically tax companies like MSFT to publicly subsidize alternatives.

I mean how much would something like neovim or emacs or helix or neovide improve if they could hire a team of full time developers? Why should economic value both be dictated and captured by a small set of people? I rather have this be guided by a consortium of developers in the form of open source grants.

Still doesn't make any sense. Visual Studio (not Code) has been available since the 90s. The free Community edition has existed since 2014. Sublime Text, Atom, etc. came during that time and did just fine.

> I mean how much would something like neovim or emacs or helix or neovide improve if they could hire a team of full time developers?

I don't think a lack of developers is holding them back. They just don't appeal to most people because they run in a terminal or are vim/emacs-focused.

> I rather have this be guided by a consortium of developers in the form of open source grants.

You'd likely end up with the same result. That grant money would come from a finite pool of money, how much money do you think would go to editors targeting niche users vs. editors with broad appeal?

Is GitHub really profitable, considering how much Actions credits are given away to open source projects as well as free users? Same goes for Copilot.

> Is GitHub really profitable

Well I had assumed that GitHub was profitable, since it used to be independent, and it feels like it should be profitable right now. But I tried Googling "is GitHub profitable" just now, and the first few results seem to suggest that either it's still losing money or that nobody knows. So I was likely incorrect about that point, sorry.

> considering how much Actions credits are given away to open source projects as well as free users?

GitLab does the same thing, and they are definitely profitable [0], so that on its own isn't necessarily a barrier.

[0]: https://ir.gitlab.com/news/news-details/2026/GitLab-Reports-...

They said cottage industry, not software industry.

Edit: s/he/they/woops sorry

OK but is that even true? Lots of people buy IntelliJ licenses (or if they've stopped I'm guessing it has more to do with Claude Code than VS Code).

By the way, Claude Code works well from inside emacs.

Have releases of other open-source tools destroyed cottage industries? Certainly they have, to an extent.

Would it be better if most tools you use were proprietary, built by cottage industries? I doubt it. Especially if we notice that cottage industries tend to consolidate, and the few remaining players are rarely very community-oriented.

No, what would be better is creating a VAT against big tech and VC investments so that the public can decide what technology is worth developing.

If the VAT amounted to $10,000,000,000 of tax revenue annually (something that is quite easy to do against an industry that has several trillion dollar corporations) that is enough to 100,000 open source projects with $100,000 grants.

This would literally unleash to much economic value that would be truly controlled by the public.

That is the future I want to build towards, anything that gives people more power against corporations and in the software world that means funding open source.

I can't think of a single open source dev that wouldn't mind a $100,000 grant for the likely millions they provide in economic value.

I started migrating away for VSCode, piece by piece.

But if you need it:

Theia/Positron/VSCodium

For Python/Julia? Many alternatives. For C family? Similar Java/Go? Similar.

I keep VSCode because their seamless SSH integration (remote files editing) is so damn good.

Filezilla Portable for me. I never use SSH through VSCode. Most of the people I work with, do.

VSCode is a binary product and therefore it is dangerous.

I don't want to have high friction from having to copy files to my host then back. I also don't want to experience latency from editing remotely. Thus, this.

Emacs had it first ;-D (And still does.)

They're open-sourcing things either because they get no value from them anymore, or just want more unpaid "community" labour.

OK well that's the whole "open source" model. It's not some Microsoft perversion of it. The reason they moved from "free software" to "open source" was specifically rejecting the ideological stuff that would prevent business exploitation

I think Microsoft stopped being the "darling" in 1994 when they got sued by Stacker and had to pay $120 million for stealing their source code and using it in their own product.

> I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL

I was genuinely puzzled by that, actually. I thought it quite obvious from the start that Nadella is no longer interested in Windows and other Microsoft software as products and will be moving them to thin cloud wrappers, but for some reason people were really optimistic about the "New Microsoft".

I remember going to Linuxfest NW some years ago. Microsoft had a big booth there... "MICROSOFT <3 LINUX"

I couldn't believe how many people sucked that shit up.

A lot of developers (and thereby most on HN, I guess) see Microsoft only from the perspective of a private consumer. From the perspective of a normal non-technical company though, Microsoft is this giant that has spread its products throughout your organisation like a cancer and you can never free yourself from it. For Microsoft's main business it's irrelevant if VSCode is mostly open source or not. That is why these gestures never meant anything in the first place.

It doesn't matter if some Microsoft trinkets are open sourced while AD is not and while you still can't connect your open source DNS and DHCP server to a Microsoft domain controller. Or have your open source email client be 100% compatible with the proprietary Exchange protocol.

There's also business value in "good enough" that Microsoft satisfies for enterprises. You get a lot of stuff "for free" with something like an E5 license: EDR, DLP, MDM, a full cloud IAM system, and a ton of cross app magic for the lowest common denominator of non-technical employees that you just aren't going to get without spending considerable developer effort to piece together a stack yourself.

What looks like cancer to us looks like a massive reduction in operational risk to a CFO/CIO.

This is especially true if your core business has nothing to do with software or tech. Much easier to cut a check to Redmond. Microsoft is basically a utility company for enterprise now, it's commoditized IT. "Do what you do best, outsource the rest."

This has been happening with Video Games for a while. There is a major initiative called "Stop Killing Games" which was triggered when Ubisoft bricked "The Crew" when servers were shutdown.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

There has been some success. There is new legislation in California which has passed the Assembly. https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/22330/stop-killing-game...

And there is a citizens initiative in Europe which the the European Commission must respond to: https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...

It's good legislation. I would love to see this extended to "Stop Killing Software" in general, with the same provisions.

Hopefully SKG can serve as a precedent to help consumer rights expand.

I think you should be allowed to stop supporting software or shut down your servers.

Even if you sold a “perpetual license”?

> I think you should be allowed to stop supporting software or shut down your servers.

That has nothing to do with Stop Killing Games.

At least the servers bit seems very related no? I’d love to know more though.

The movement explicitly DOESNT want to force companies to keep their servers running. It is singularily concerned with keeping games playable in some form after shutdown. Be it via patching out the requirement on a server, providing a way to host it yourself or any other option, really.

You should not be able to shut down the ability to play a game if it cost money to buy.

You should at least have to refund customers when you take away the ability to use a product they purchased.

This is fair for some reasonable time window after purchase. But I think it's okay for things to have a lifespan even if they cost money.

As long as the life span is clearly spelled out when you purchase, so you know that you are actually buying a 10 year subscription, and not a game.

This would be a much preferable law to the one actually proposed.

No. It's not a physical good that is subject to wear and tear. There is no excuse for a single player game to have a lifespan because it has some pointless online verification component.

I think it should be legal to sell something with a pointless online verification component.

Yes you should!

Give me one good reason why.

Because I think it's good for software developers and consumers for people to have the flexibility to sell something that depends on online services which may become unavailable at some point in the future. This is more valuable than requiring indefinite support, public pluggable backends, or required open sourcing or backend redistribution, which imposes onerous technical or business limitations for an extremely minor consumer benefit all things considered.

If this removes people’s access to products (software licenses count as products here) someone payed fir once. Then you should only be allowed to do that if you enable people to continue using the product.

Releasing the server code should be a requirement. Software updates shouldn’t be required. Unless the product has a moment where it will stop functioning on the hardware it was build for built in (such as an expiring certificate).

This is much worse. The Crew was always framed as an 'always online' game, even if that was technically a farce. This would be more like if Bethesda rolled out an update to cripple Skyrim after releasing a new Elder Scrolls game to lackluster sales.

"Their lawyers will win" is plainly wrong assumption if something is clearly illegal.

Yeah. But it seems unlikely that that's the caes here.

Sadly that only works when all parties agree on the "clearly" part. They will lose, but only if you can endure years of squabbling in court and have unlimited funds for your legal team to prove that the aforementioned clearly really is clear. More likely they'll bleed you dry and force a settlement with an NDA bolt on. For a company like MS, pissing a few million down the drain on making life hell for litigants turns into a sound investment: no one looks at it and thinks "I want what they're having". This is where you would ideally have a government-backed consumer rights agency step in and take up the battle.

You didn't start using libreoffice.org like 15 years ago?

I did. SunOffice, then OpenOffice, then LibreOffice. It still isn't very good, though.

I think you mean "StarOffice" which later forked into OpenOffice, then LibreOffice.

There is OnlyOffice

Recent year or two LibreOffice has improved greatly as far as the UX goes and I haven't had to use Word/Excel in decades. When I have to use it for work I use the online app and office online apps are also garbage, especially compared to Google Docs / Sheets stability and performance.

Most companies didn't, no.

Just because alternatives exist for some people some of the time does not mean Office is worthless, or that buying it isn't rational.

(Though buying it starts to look a lot less rational when things like this happen.)

Most Microsoft purchases at a large organization are rational only because of how much the company has already sunk into Microsoft. Microsoft's strategy had never been centered on their software succeeding on its intrinsic merits.

Consequently the best part of not buying Microsoft's shitty software is that it spares you from "having" to buy their (other) shitty software.

> Microsoft's strategy had never been centered on their software succeeding on its intrinsic merits.

Microsoft used to build the best stuff. I'm not sure when that ended, I just remember the decline. I used to -jump- at release day for their latest OS version. Their dev tools were considered top tier and I used to like Word. Now every interaction I have with a MS product is painful and my trust in them is so far negative that I always assume the worst for every interaction. Wanna keep playing Minecraft without an MS account? We -promise- not to stop allowing you to do that after we buy it..... Want to use your computer without us advertising? Want to even use your computer without MS as a gatekeeper for your login? I have no idea why anyone would give them a dollar other than lock-in.

The span in which it would make sense to be keen on jumping to the latest OS pretty narrow.

XP was their first OS that required an activation code. Ever since then it's been downhill and things have only gotten worse.

I dunno what you're talking about. Even the "creation" of MS-DOS wasn't like that. When was Microsoft making the best stuff? When they were selling their version of Basic, before MS-DOS?

> Most Microsoft purchases at a large organization are rational only because of how much the company has already sunk into Microsoft. Microsoft's strategy had never been centered on their software succeeding on its intrinsic merits.

Microsoft has lots of crappy software, and I personally find MS Office rather irritating, but I'd still argue that it's the best office suite currently available. Like yes, it has lots of bugs and weird misfeatures, but all its competitors are either buggier or only have less than a tenth of the features that MS Office does.

Hard agree. In the past, companies made their profits by providing value that induces a sale, but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value. The main difference being we are moving away from clearly defined transactions and companies view their customer base as a resource that they can trade increasing amounts of asymmetric, long-term exploitation for some pre-calculated probability of churn.

And of course companies like Microsoft or the car companies in your example have experimentally determined that the less transparent and immediate the product transaction is, the less likely some percent of their customer base will fully understand exactly what it is they are giving and receiving in turn from each of the companies that supposedly providing them value.

The answer is not to simply boycott, but to actively and aggressively punish companies for acting with this particular brand of capitalist maliciousness. It includes being vocal online but also pushing for more aggressive countermeasures against unchecked greed. Billionaire taxes, closing corporate tax loopholes, consumer protection, expanded antitrust, right to repair, labor rights. All of the policies that are “bad for business”. Because fuck them, policies that are good for business have only led to exploitation of the masses and we get nothing in return but more creative value extraction.

It’s past due we have sympathy for the corporate bottom line and time we start to get excited when companies bleed a little in the face of policies and regulations that absolutely do not care about corporate interest.

> but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value

It's rent-seeking in the economics textbook sense of the word. Actually quite straightforward once you understand and internalize that they want you to rent SAAS products forever with a monthly recurring bill into eternity. And then as the parent poster 'jmward' commented above, choose not to engage with it.

In the example of this specific product, Libreoffice is good enough. There's also a renewed European project for open source/self hosted office suite software.

> In the past, companies made their profits by providing value that induces a sale, but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value. The main difference being we are moving away from clearly defined transactions and companies view their customer base as a resource that they can trade increasing amounts of asymmetric, long-term exploitation for some pre-calculated probability of churn.

That's not an accident. In the last 1-2 decades, the largest generation in American history started retiring en masse. They didn't have enough children to replace them, because the birth rate peaked in 1965. This generation is now drawing off of retirement savings, the vast majority of which is backed by ownership in equities and bonds in publicly-traded companies.

When you don't have more people to provide value that includes a sale, like you say, and still have to increase value of equities and bonds every 90 days, you have to more intensely monetize each customer.

It's only going to get worse unless you bring a lot of people into the market as new potential customers, but you can only do so much of that without causing social disharmony.

100%. One of my crazy ideas (but a good one) is to invite all of pakistan to america in order to fix it all

Instead, we’re shoving out people who had already chosen America, and scaring a bunch of others off.

> Forget the 'is it legal or not' arguments, their lawyers will win. Just get mad and tell them this is wrong. Stop buying their #$@#$ software.

I'm surprised that going through the legal system is already seen as completely useless, but calling for a consumer mass boycott would totally work...

I think it's a vanishingly small number of consumers buying Office compared to businesses.

If you consider that profit is a function of price and cost, and price is a function of scarcity (i.e. demand relative to supply), then over time, logic dictates that a strategy of profit maximization will work to create scarcity as soon as the profit curve plateaus. In economic orthodoxy, the only defense against this is the hope that there is more than one supplier and that they will remain adversarial, which is not an equilibrium state if you consider that a strategy of cooperative pricing and supply curtailment can at times maximize profits more effectively than competitive oversupply. Perhaps we've been judging the benefits of unregulated free markets based solely on our observations of the first half of the profit curve. Perhaps we're now seeing many of the world's markets moving to the latter half.

This is a rather strong analysis. And especially the point on behaviour change once market growth plateaus was new to me. Thanks!

I do want to nitpick on “unregulated free markets”. Because it’s almost an oxymoron. At least if one wants to rely on the theorems that prove free markets are best.

Those theorems assume a bit more than just a lack of regulation. They assume no information imbalance between parties. No ways outside of competition to keep out market entrants, and no collusion between market parties. All of those assumptions, in order to approach them in the real world, really require some strong regulation.

Hence I would argue that the problem isn’t just the growth curve flattening, but also a US (and EU) halt to Trust busting. Massive weakening of consumer protection agencies, and a general weakening of regulatory agencies by e.g. court cases.

It’s not just that we need stronger regulation because tech companies reached a point in their lifecycle where they wish to exploit more, as you so clearly argued. On top of that, regulatory power has been pulled back.

Agreed. I would define a market as a mutual social contract that favours voluntary estimation of resource value, and exchange thereof, over violent competition for resources. Such a contact must necessarily be enforced, since voluntary compliance among humans is never 100%. So yes, some form of regulation is built into the very definition of a free market. I'm fond of saying that, as rules approach zero, competition approaches war.

As this is only a problem for people/companies who have willingly decided to be customers of Microsoft, I'm having a hard time getting outraged over this.

This is how they've always behaved, and anyone who is surprised by this hasn't been paying attention for the last 30 years.

I agree. Take what ya can, give nothing back!

I gave you an upvote. How many downvotes did you get?

I never used anything by Microsoft since I bailed to Macs after Windows 8.. and with Nintendo, PlayStation and CrossOver etc for games I never even felt the need to.

Every time I took a look at Windows once every few years it still reeked of shit.

A happy 10~ years ..until they bought GitHub. Then they crippled the Visual Studio Code Extensions Marketplace so VSCodium users couldn't easily install some extensions.

Coincidentally I was just in a YouTube rabbit hole of old operating systems and computing platforms in the 1980s and 90s and how Microsoft killed them with scummy tactics, like sending suited thugs to Japanese PC manufacturers and threatening to pull the Windows license if they even OFFERED users an OPTION for alternative OSes!

Fuck Microsoft. Bill Gates deserves a few more pies in his face.

Bill Gates also deserves a criminal investigation into what he did on Pedo Island.

No, I think we do need legal protection. We have so many high quality protections when it comes to real-world items -- they could be better, but if companies are going to move everything on line, and put tech in everything, they can goddamn give us the same level of protections.