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The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

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Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#171

Post by giancarlostoro »

fadzlan wrote: post #130

The extension by design is made to be optional to use and are not integral (I would argue) to the vanilla experience of VS Code. That also means that if other people wants to create their own proprietary extensions they can do so. The basic experience of the plain VS Code does not change. Now one can say indeed that the Remote and also LiveShare is the best extension there of, and since the extension author decides n…

I think enough of VS Code is open sourced to where if it truly were necessary to do a more serious fork with a community market place and all that jazz it would probably build up a userbase. Developers dont like certain amounts of shennanigans from companies. If Microsoft doesnt want to risk a mass exodus they will make sure not to do anything extra stupid with VS Code. Especially considering for some its the one Microsoft product sucking them in.

Update:

On the other hand with Neovim being able to run headless you may just need that and VS Code stripped and use Neovim for the underlying editing and plugins if you really wanted to have a more open VS Code ecosystem. Kind of a hack, but it would work.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#172

Post by wlesieutre »

fadzlan wrote: post #130

The extension by design is made to be optional to use and are not integral (I would argue) to the vanilla experience of VS Code. That also means that if other people wants to create their own proprietary extensions they can do so. The basic experience of the plain VS Code does not change. Now one can say indeed that the Remote and also LiveShare is the best extension there of, and since the extension author decides n…

code-server has most extensions available. They do it by scraping GitHub for extensions and building them.

https://github.com/cdr/code-server/blob/3da6c561b83d2a4c57f3...

The Microsoft extensions are notably missing, but they have a lot of other ones. There's an issue template for requesting another one if you find something missing.

Not sure if their second extension store is available for use by software other than code-server, but it's not an impossible problem.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#174

Post by cxr »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #34

And even the C++ intellicode/parser extension is proprietary. But no, last time this was mentioned, it was downvoted to oblivion. "But, you see, they put the intellicode C++ extension in Github, so it must be opensource!" Wrong. They are just using Github to distribute binaries. If you download the vsix file from either github or the vscode extension repos, you will find a 10MB binary called cpptools that was not the…

> If you download the vsix file from either github or the vscode extension repos, you will find a 10MB binary called cpptools that was not there in the source tarball. The extension does nothing without it.

I've seen people try a similar maneuver when discussing Pocket. If you point out that the reported plans/expected outcome of Pocket being made open source have never come to fruition, even though it's now been 3 and a half years since Mozilla Corp acquired them, there's a certain type of person who will do a cursory search and point to the Pocket org on GitHub in an attempt to score some points and say you're wrong...

... without ever actually checking that the code in question is even there.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#175

Post by stonemetal12 »

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…

Is it though? On the VSCode site it says "Built on open source." I don't see anywhere it says "Is open source."

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#177

Post by moron4hire »

GordonS wrote: post #79
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.

It runs in a browser shell. It's got WebRTC ready to go. The hardest part of WebRTC is dealing with whatever bullshit Mozilla and Apple are doing this week, so given that browser shell is Chrome, and you can hardly walk through a computer science journal without tripping over a consensus algorithm paper these days, it's really not that complex.

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#178

Post by jjuel »

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…

From what I can tell from the official VS Code site by Microsoft they no where say that it is a fully open source piece of software. Infact they say "Free. Built on Open Source. Runs Everywhere" So they are saying it is "Built on Open Source" which means something completely different to me.

https://code.visualstudio.com

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#179

Post by Dayshine »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #34

And even the C++ intellicode/parser extension is proprietary. But no, last time this was mentioned, it was downvoted to oblivion. "But, you see, they put the intellicode C++ extension in Github, so it must be opensource!" Wrong. They are just using Github to distribute binaries. If you download the vsix file from either github or the vscode extension repos, you will find a 10MB binary called cpptools that was not the…

Right, they ported their proprietary language server from Visual Studio to VS Code.

Why would we expect them to open-source a completely different project just because they're adding support for a new editor?

Re: The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

#180

Post by submeta »

I am very skeptical of Microsoft, even in 2020, with a visionary, embracing CEO. VS Code is a beautiful product with very nice defaults out of the box, very polished workflows and user-experience when it comes to extending it. With this free offer MS drove many competing products out of the market (Sublime Text anyone?). Google trends for VS Code is sky rocketing.

Thank you Microsoft, but I stick to the intelliJ family when I need a serious IDE and Emacs for all other text related stuff.

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