Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

underjord.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 277 posts

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#71

Post by ohthehugemanate »

skohan wrote: post #7

I 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…

> 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

Try removing the word "proprietary" from that strategy, and see if it still fits the evidence you see. Or replace it with "paid".

Look at their earnings reports (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q4...). Licensing proprietary software is a small and shrinking piece of the pie, they don't even segment that way anymore in fiscal reports. They are (successfully) pivoting to become the Enterprise cloud service provider, and tightly integrated tools are an important part of that picture. Licenses simply aren't. So it's not "commercial office365", it's "commercial office365 and cloud", because o365 has tightly integrated Azure services and the revenue is tracked together. Which parts are OSS licensed is irrelevant, because that's not a primary revenue driver anymore.

A good example is the fastest growing service on Azure, AKS. 100% open source, even the implementation down to bare metal. They don't care about keeping it proprietary, because they make the same money with it either way.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#72

Post by chriswwweb »

alkonaut wrote: post #49

So don’t use liveshare? It’s still a compelling (Open source) editor without liveshare. I don’t think LiveShare is a top-10 feature of vscode. It’s one of the better unique features but that’s something else.

I thought the same, the article title is (deliberately) misleading by using the word "parts" instead of being clear and stating that some extensions that you can get from the store might not be opensource ... I had never heard of LiveShare before and have no need for it, I have lots of extensions installed and don't think any of them is proprietary

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#74

Post by em-bee »

GordonS wrote: post #33
CiTyBear wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it says "Software not open-source is bad". But more something like "It is marketed as open source but it is not". Developers should be aware that VSCode is not as open source as it claims it is. In my circles, developers could swear VSCode is fully open source without even knowing VSCodium. If people were more aware about this, they might think twice before using VSCode for everything and getting lock-i…

I know full well about VSCodium, but choose not to use it. For all intents and purposes, VSCode is open source - the source code it freely avaibale on github under an MIT license. AFAIK only the installer and some extensions are not open source - that plainly doesn't mean VSCode itself isn't open source. VSCode is a fantastic tool, and I'd prefer to use it directly from Microsoft. I am aware that there is telemetry,…

isn't that the same thing with chrome vs chromium?

chrome as a whole is not Open Source or Free Software while chromium is.

whether that matters to you is up to you. those who want to use Free Software or Open Source should use Chromium and VSCodium

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#75

Post by dmortin »

CiTyBear wrote: post #14
sudhirj wrote: post #3

Yes 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 pr…

I don't think it says "Software not open-source is bad". But more something like "It is marketed as open source but it is not". Developers should be aware that VSCode is not as open source as it claims it is. In my circles, developers could swear VSCode is fully open source without even knowing VSCodium. If people were more aware about this, they might think twice before using VSCode for everything and getting lock-i…

Most developers don't care they just want to get to job done. Many of them use IntelliJ, etc. which is not free software either.

Those who care about using fee software already know about these things, because they check before starting to use a new software.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#76

Post by nudpiedo »

d4rti wrote: post #54
nudpiedo wrote: post #40

I do not understand people with allergy to non OSS. Compare that to any google service which barely releases the clients as open source, and the clients usually are so complex that may need quite long time to get any professional developer productive in such complex code bases. Also being tied to a controlled protocol, set of libraries, cloud infrastructure which does actually keep your data is in fact the actual evi…

Your comment neatly alludes to the difference between the Open Source philosophies and the Free Software philosophy, and the biggest point of difference is "freedom for whom?" wherein OSS is about freedom for developers and FSF is about freedom for users. Most users don't actually fall in either camp, and largely care about free as in beer (gratis), or possibly free as in doesn't require complex purchasing processes…

Having worked in large corporations and now wishing to bootstrap my own projects here my two cents on how I see things currently in the OSS/FS:

I see the current state of FS as a way to cooperate between organizations in an almost transparent way and at the same time protect themselves from competitors by making the entry barrier to the market higher to little players as they would need to be remarkably stronger than the current free offering.

Sure, everyone wins by having more accessible free knowledge and products everywhere, but now these markets have quite high entry bar for anyone who doesn't have enough capital to be in a market which cannot sustain smaller players.

Somehow `massive` OSS defeats the competitiveness of capitalism and that is something which wasn't expected when FS was originally formulated. Also a project which appears to be free but it is extremely lobbied and flooded with milions of many companies and contains incredibly large amounts of financing and development time is not accessible to most of the users anymore as these are overpowered by corporations.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#77

Post by GordonS »

em-bee wrote: post #74
GordonS wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know full well about VSCodium, but choose not to use it. For all intents and purposes, VSCode is open source - the source code it freely avaibale on github under an MIT license. AFAIK only the installer and some extensions are not open source - that plainly doesn't mean VSCode itself isn't open source. VSCode is a fantastic tool, and I'd prefer to use it directly from Microsoft. I am aware that there is telemetry,…

isn't that the same thing with chrome vs chromium? chrome as a whole is not Open Source or Free Software while chromium is. whether that matters to you is up to you. those who want to use Free Software or Open Source should use Chromium and VSCodium

This divisive "us and them" stance is unnecessary, and doesn't help anyone.

OSS and free software matters to me - so I use VSCode, which is OSS. Whether extensions are OSS or not is immaterial (the same extensions you can use with VSCodium!).

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#78

Post by thisiswater »

skohan wrote: post #37
CiTyBear wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it says "Software not open-source is bad". But more something like "It is marketed as open source but it is not". Developers should be aware that VSCode is not as open source as it claims it is. In my circles, developers could swear VSCode is fully open source without even knowing VSCodium. If people were more aware about this, they might think twice before using VSCode for everything and getting lock-i…

Yes this is exactly the risk: developers become dependent on the VSCode extension ecosystem, while thinking they are safely using only FOSS tools. This is the kind of double-speak which lets MS have the best of both worlds. From a marketing/developer relations perspective, developers think they are using open-source tools. But in actuality, developers are investing in workflows where MS is a critical link in the chai…

As the author puts it: "It makes me less certain that this isn't the Extend in Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#79

Post by GordonS »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #56

On the other hand you have IntelliJ which is closed source, and doesn't have any live share feature. Despite it being a highly voted feature on their feature/bug tracking site https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-708

> Despite it being a highly voted feature

To be fair, this is a really complex feature to add, so it would be a serious commitment from JetBrains to build it.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#80

Post by ohthehugemanate »

skohan wrote: post #42
ponker wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's 3. MS realized that it's not as powerful as it was in the 80s and 90s because Apple and Google took over a huge portion of the computing market with mobile. So they have "changed their ways," not because of any altruism but because they have to change their ways to compete from a position that, while enviably strong, is also a laggard especially on the consumer and developer side of the business.

The problem with that is because if the only reason they changed their ways is because they lost the competitive advantage, what confidence should you have that they won't change back if they regain market-share? It doesn't make me feel great about them owning the platform where almost all open source software is hosted, and one of the most dominant tools for writing code.

It's a company, in one of the most cutthroat industries in the world. Of course they do everything for competitive advantage, that's the same for all of them. Do you honestly think Amazon or Google are any different in this regard?

Microsoft's embrace of open source is about making their PaaS offerings universally compatible, and about trying to meet developers where they are. They will continue this strategy as long as it remains super profitable; ie as long as great developers have a preference for OSS, and as long as OSS remains a key part of the software ecosystem. If you want Microsoft to remain open source friendly, those are your battlefields.

Post reply on HN