71–80 of 149 posts
Here's $0.00. Take it, and buy yourself a real editor. Anything you choose to pay above that goes to needy children in Uganda. corrected per systemvoltage : https://www.vim.org/sources.php
Just so we're completely off of Microsoft. :-)
I had to use VS Code it briefly for a class, and was kind of shocked by the telemetry stuff, and that it's just ignore-accepted by both the students and the instructors. But what turned me off more was this janky feeling around the whole application, something I don't remember experiencing in many other Microsoft tools, such as VB. It feels like it was designed from the code up rather than from the interface down, an…
> For example, HSTS is now baked into the all the standard distributions and there's absolutely no way (that I've found) to turn it off. I understand the "security" reasons behind it for regular users, but as someone mindful and often completely unable to access a website only because their certificate has expired, I am quite miffed.
I triple checked because I wanted to be absolutely sure: HSTS is a response header (Strict-Transport-Security) sent by the server. It is expressed as the intent of the website you’re trying to visit that it shouldn’t be accessed insecurely. The “bad application behavior” is honoring the site’s express intent and the standard, voluntarily adopted by the server you’re trying to access.
You’re certainly welcome to use or write your own HTTP client which ignores the intent of resources you want to access. You’re just as welcome to write your own browser which ignores CORS and all manner of other client/user protections. It’s baffling that you feel entitled to have people do that work for you. Particularly because nearly all of the work already has been done for you, and you’re still miffed because they didn’t cater to your preferences in the exact way you want.
Seems legit to me.
This is a good summary of the playing field, but I think they're way overblowing the panic In summary Microsoft has: - Made an incredibly good web-based code editor which is 100% OSS, no strings attached - Made an extensions repository and a bunch of really high quality first-party extensions that have restricted licenses Sure, in a perfect world the whole thing would be fully OSS. But in the worst-case, where people…
> but I think they're way overblowing the panic I think some concern is warranted simply because few people are aware that the default VS Code distribution has spyware and proprietary addons in it, and you do need to use something else if you prefer a fully FLOSS ecosystem.
But I think anybody who even knows what FLOSS means would know to at least do some research before installing an application from Microsoft if that's something they're worried about
All in all, I still don't see a reason for panic. The author makes it sound like Microsoft is going to kill the entire open-source editor ecosystem and prevent anybody from ever creating an alternative to their worse and worse "venus flytrap" of a tool. I just don't see a pathway to that.
Personally, I wouldn't actually care if Visual Studio Code was completely proprietary with zero open source element. I think the imagined consequences tend to mostly be not that significant for the vast majority of people, at most it would be a blip in the timeline as people switch to something else. The actual consequence (as implied by this article) seems to be people who build their business around these tools, th…
The consequences for the majority are such that, over time, leading language ecosystems become tied to Microsoft services. One example in the article is the availability of alternative editors and IDEs decreasing over time in favor of extensions to VSCode. Essentially, we are driving towards a monoculture - either you are using VSCode and adjacent services, or you choose an alternative, pay the price of compatibility…
The author does touch on why companies like Microsoft are able to succeed against open source software. It's because they have the money to pay their own developers to make good software.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft but not under DevDiv or Azure.
I had to use VS Code it briefly for a class, and was kind of shocked by the telemetry stuff, and that it's just ignore-accepted by both the students and the instructors. But what turned me off more was this janky feeling around the whole application, something I don't remember experiencing in many other Microsoft tools, such as VB. It feels like it was designed from the code up rather than from the interface down, an…
> The situation with bad application behaviors being "baked into the code" and propagating to all the "free" distributions is very sad, similar to what's happening with both Chrome and Firefox. > For example, HSTS is now baked into the all the standard distributions and there's absolutely no way (that I've found) to turn it off. I understand the "security" reasons behind it for regular users, but as someone mindful a…
(You are right that HSTS is a response header, but I think that it is a bad idea. Even though I have a old version of Firefox, I had to edit one of the files to make it unable to recognize that response header, and change many other things.)
I remember when the FSF had dire warnings about using the Sun JDK. I ignored it and kept on using Java, and nothing bad happened. The JDK was eventually GPLed, and by then I decided I didn't like Java anymore and moved on to better languages anyway. I feel kind of the same about VS Code. Binary product? Telemetry? Centralized marketplace? Some plugins are closed source? Eh, whatever. That stuff doesn't get in my way…
Such as?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder did the drive behind people creating open source JDKs have nothing to do with Sun open sourcing theirs? I wonder in an alternative world where Sun locked down Java as hard as possible and sued anyone and everyone, would they not have been bought by Oracle? Are we sure that an editor will be able to displace VS Code in the future, if it's given away for free and so feature-packed? Browsers are another example…
But ultimately these applications are still winning based on merit. If somebody created a new editor or browser that was substantially better, nothing's really stopping everyone from moving to it. Now- we can talk about how it's a problem that nobody can afford to build something good enough to compete with what these megacorps can afford to develop and give away for free. But that's a different, older, much bigger d…
But it's important to call out that the user experience most people care about has almost nothing to do with whether or not software is open/hackable.
Because of that, I would suggest it is realistic that a decade or two from now we could largely lose that feature, and find we have 100% proprietary cloud-based IDEs.
...Microsoft in true Microsoft form of moving ever so slowly and doing it over a generation of people as not to spook them has been transitioning their customer base into consumers of services offered by Microsoft. A company like Microsoft is changing the software industry by moving developers to a SaaS model, and articles like this suggest this is a terrible thing because we're losing control over what we do, they'r…
Do we even visit the same HN site? The HN crowd i'm used to loves open source, self-hosting, prefers privacy, frowns upon the prevalence of subscription-based SaaS, and yearns for the times when the internet was less laden with advertising and attempts to make a quick buck. Maybe you mistake HN for Y Combinator, the company that runs it? I'd say that Y Combinator is picky, relative to other VCs, and I don't remember…