The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary • Hacker News Board

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#81

Post by ponker » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 9:42 AM UTC

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.

All companies become more sociopathic as they become more powerful. Look at Google's "Don't Be Evil" which went from inspirational, to corny, to sickening. The solution here isn't to try to support companies that won't do this (they all will, eventually)... it's to regulate how powerful they can get.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#82

Post by skohan » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 9:47 AM UTC

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #71

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 so…

Let's imagine that a few years from now, MS starts advertising Azure right inside VSCode, and they start releasing features which favor Azure integration, and actually cause problems when working with GCP.

Now imagine I as a developer want to pick up shop and move to another editor, but it turns out my workflow depends on proprietary extensions which are only available on VSCode, and my velocity will be cut by 70% if I switch editors.

If MS owns the interface most developers have to their code, there are all kinds of ways they could leverage that to your disadvantage.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#83

Post by skohan » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 9:49 AM UTC

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #80

skohan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I certainly don't think Amazon or Google are any different, but I'm not using their code editors, and I'm not hosting my open source projects on their platform.

It's not about MS being worse than the other tech giants, it's about opting out of these kinds of tools in favor of more open, less corporate controlled tools in general.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#84

Post by cm2187 » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 9:50 AM UTC

sjellis wrote: post #23

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…

I would say that it can be both. Large organizations like Microsoft have so many different people and teams that there isn't necessarily a group-think. On the contrary, different teams will have different priorities, and keeping people aligned is a really hard job. The thing that bothers me about Visual Studio Code is that does conform to the general Microsoft rule of enabling telemetry by default. IMO, this is not g…

Yeah, clearly the Windows team thinks it is still in the mid 90s.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#85

Post by ciroduran » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 9:54 AM UTC

This sounds like a very similar argument for other IDEs, such as Eclipse. You have a free IDE, with open source code, and a giant plugin ecosystem, but the plugins themselves aren't free nor open source. What's new under the sun?

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#86

Post by anxmla » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 9:55 AM UTC

d4rti wrote: post #64

sjellis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that it can be both. Large organizations like Microsoft have so many different people and teams that there isn't necessarily a group-think. On the contrary, different teams will have different priorities, and keeping people aligned is a really hard job. The thing that bothers me about Visual Studio Code is that does conform to the general Microsoft rule of enabling telemetry by default. IMO, this is not g…

I used to be quite hardline on this matter myself, but I found the julialang [1] discussion on this topic quite a persuasive argument in favour of default telemetry. I think it's a difficult ethical question, because there are balancing concerns and interests, and most behaviour doesn't easily fall into the obviously wrong or obviously right categories. [1] https://discourse.julialang.org/t/pkg-jl-telemetry-should-be…

There is a difference between, say, Debian popcon (which is opt in during install) and the 50 MSFT tracking options that are enabled despite having ticked the "no" box during install.

One of which is a keylogger! Windows 10 is pure evil.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#87

Post by microtonal » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 9:55 AM UTC

benbristow wrote: post #35

nix23 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

You can look at the source code on GitHub here and compile it yourself if you want... https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/master/src

They are reacting to the parent who seems to have the misconception that all JavaScript is OSI opensource because you can read the source code.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#88

Post by matt_LLVW » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 9:56 AM UTC

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

the base install is open source tho: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#89

Post by diffeomorphism » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 9:57 AM UTC

anaisbetts wrote: post #27

I mean, if you don't like that then you probably shouldn't be using Google Chrome because it has similarly proprietary bits (geolocation, translation are a few examples, but there are afaik ~30-50). Firefox most likely does as well.

If you don't know, you shouldn't throw accusations.

Also at least for firefox and chromium (but not chrome) you can look at the source.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#90

Post by chriswwweb » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 9:57 AM UTC

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…

As far as I'm aware of, Microsoft is not even trying to put their own services forward. For example neither Github nor Azure are the defaults in VSCode. Go to the source control section and use what ever source control tool you want, VSCode does not even suggest you use Github. They also don't bundle extensions like LiveShare with VSCode, by including it into the VSCode installer they distribute on their own website.

This is why I disagree with your claim that Microsoft is giving away VSCode away for free to promote their own proprietary tools. You can shame Microsoft for trying to improve their image by making VSCode, Typescript, ... opensource. To me this is totally different from bundling your own Browser into an operating system to increase artificially your market share, you can't compare the two.

There is nothing bad about not blindly trusting a big corporation like Microsoft, but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past, that they write articles that are (deliberately?) misleading. In this case, by saying parts of VSCode are opensource when it is just some extensions. This is putting VSCode on a pedestal with Chrome, but the comparaison is all wrong, Chrome includes lots of proprietary parts, while chromium is the opensource variant you can build yourself, but for VSCode this is completely different as the version distributed on the Microsoft website doesn't include anything besides the opensource code from Github repository.