Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup all the free stuff is ultimately to lead us into using and paying for Azure. Need an open source alternative to GitHub.
Why? It's not like you MUST deploy on Azure
There was a time when I was hopeful and though Microsoft would take a developer first approach with the end goal being making it easy to deploy to Azure. After seeing the VSO (the old name for Codespaces) pricing I'm a lot more cynical. Microsoft's going to be altruistic until they're not.
Go look at the pricing for VSO. They have a full time dev (100 hours a month - lol) estimated at a cost of $23 USD per month. Just wait until there's some type of marketplace for extension developers. The local version of VSCode will disappear overnight and (IMO) we'll be paying $50+ / month for the same thing that's free right now.
Get ready to pay for everything per user per month for the rest of your life.