The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
1–10 of 277 posts
Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
#2Just like many other products, developers have bills to pay.
Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
#3Yes and no. The complaint is that some widely used extensions are proprietary. If these extensions require MS servers, then they have every reason to be. Even if they don't, there's nothing wrong with a company holding back some stuff they consider strategic, they're not obligated to release them.
If we're debating the OSS credentials of VSCode, it'll need to be based on the code already released (which makes it a pretty great OSS editor) and the current team of people the company has devoted to maintaining that OSS section of the product (also pretty great).
Arguing that there are some extensions that are closed source and that's bad is a bit weird, especially when we can just make an open sourced extension that does the same thing.
Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
#4Just like many other products, developers have bills to pay.
Huh? The developers at microsoft get paid no matter how the company licenses things.
Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
#5Just use vim.
Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
#6I really like VS Code, but am definitely wary of the way that it intermingles open source, proprietary code and remote services. For that reason, I use the VSCodium build most of the time.
You definitely need to take responsibility and read the documentation for each extension that you decide to install. You may be surprised.
I would also disagree with the article and recommend that you disable telemetry, unless you specifically decide that you want that copy of VS Code and those extensions to send data. I understand the value of telemetry data, but I think that turning it on by default is unethical: software should not be written to automatically transmit data to remote systems without explicit user consent.
Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
#7I can be counted as one of the skeptics of MS's open-source efforts. It just seems to me that MS's history and recent investment in open-source puts us in a quantum state between two possibilities:
1. MS has changed their ways, and has become an altruist organization which just wants to give developers things of value for free so they might hopefully choose Azure when they decide what cloud provider to run on.
2. MS is embedding themselves in the open-source community in such a way that it's almost unavoidable to make use of their proprietary tools without even realizing it, and they will use that to their advantage against competitors and developers.
It's just hard for me to think that the second possibility won't become increasingly true to the extent that MS gains the leverage to get away with it.
As a side-note, I think MS's marketing for VSCode has been very effective. As an editor, I don't see an advantage over 𝚖̶𝚘̶𝚛̶𝚎̶ ̶𝚘̶𝚙̶𝚎̶𝚗̶ less corporate alternatives like SublimeText, and I actually don't like the "install this plugin" spam in the bottom right corner.
Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
#8The best parts of Code are the editor functions. If I had to name the good parts of Code I wouldn't even think about LiveShare, it's mostly a gimmick I've looked at once or twice.
As for the marketplace, most extensions link to their github repositories, from where you can download and install the extensions. The marketplace itself is mostly a convenience thing.
Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
#9Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
#10True that the marketplace has some weird rules (I think there is an online instance of VSCode, that scrapes Github for plugins that have permissive licenses to show them in the Marketplace tab - essentially a forked marketplace) - but the best bits of VSCode are open.
Remote plugin, terminal, marketplace are less valuable in an engineering sense than the actual editor itself.
Monaco, Monarch & LSP are projects that are directly or tangentially related to the VSCode project are they are MIT licensed and have astounding capability. Have a look at the editor API for Monaco - its extremely well engineered.
I for one am extremely thankful that these projects are open source because those are they genuinely impressive bits of engineering from VSCode.