[HN Gopher] Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture (2022)
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Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture (2022)
Author : ghuntley
Score : 370 points
Date : 2024-09-29 22:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ghuntley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ghuntley.com)
| tech234a wrote:
| (2022) with a small addition in (2023), still relevant though
| seltzered_ wrote:
| 2022 discussion (142 comments):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32657709
|
| Possibly one change in 2024 is that Typefox (which contributes
| to Eclipse Theia) announced Open Collaboration tools:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970621 ->
| https://www.typefox.io/blog/open-collaboration-tools-announc...
| (2024)
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| Here's a good comment thread from cpptools extension:
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/discussions/126...
|
| Having not delved too deeply into building from source, this post
| suggests it's not even possible.
|
| We will need some new terminology to express that a given
| codebase is OSS licensed and the build dependencies additionally
| are OSS licensed.
| toofy wrote:
| wow, thanks for posting this.
|
| in a few tiny comments it demonstrates precisely the problem
| the larger ecosystem is facing and will almost certainly get
| much much worse sooner than we think.
| kragen wrote:
| wow, that's really troubling. people in the future will wonder
| what we were talking about after microsoft memory-holes that
| thread
| wruza wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240927000850/https://github.co.
| ..
| kragen wrote:
| the internet archive isn't going to last much longer, maybe
| five or ten years
|
| as brewster says: 'governments burn libraries'
|
| there's a reason that the first backup of the internet
| archive is at alexandria and that the first time brewster
| started the internet archive it was a for-profit company
| called 'alexa'
| pxc wrote:
| VSCode is not open-source, and neither is this extension.
|
| Much F/OSS on Windows and virtually all F/OSS on macOS has
| proprietary build dependencies (e.g., MSVC on Windows, Xcode
| and various Apple frameworks and GUI toolkits on macOS), but is
| still itself F/OSS. It's true that such software doesn't
| promote or embody software freedom to the same extent as free
| software written for free platforms and built with free
| toolchains and dependencies.
|
| But this case isn't about that. Reread the comment of
| maintainer (presumably an MS employee) at the end:
|
| > I'm sorry to let you know that our license also prohibits
| using our extension in alternate distributions of VS Code -
| only the official one produced by Microsoft may be used. So
| even if we did produce a RISC-V version, you wouldn't be
| licensed to use it with Code Server.
|
| That's just proprietary, software plain and simple.
|
| Recall freedom 0 of the free software definition:
|
| > The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
| (freedom 0).
|
| In the way that third-party distributions of VSCode do not come
| with the same rights to extend the software or use it in
| combination with compatible extensions as the first-party
| distribution does, VSCode also fails the test of freedom 3,
| regardless of the license of much of the code:
|
| > The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to
| others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole
| community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the
| source code is a precondition for this.
|
| It's not that your modified copies _must_ give your users the
| same rights to inspect and modify the code as you had (that 's
| copyleft) but that you are _unable_ to give them such rights.
| MS does this not entirely through the licensing of VSCode but
| also through the licensing of certain extensions, but the
| actual outcome is the same.
|
| It's not a different story for the term open-source. This:
|
| > May we ask why you'd like to do this? If you're planning to
| redistribute the language server binaries as your own custom
| offering, please note that our runtime license prohibits that.
|
| means that the extension fails condition 1 (the redistribution
| criterion) of the open-source definition. And VSCode not
| allowing modified redistributions the same rights as the
| original fails condition 3 (the derived works criterion).
|
| Neither VSCode nor this extension is open-source. They're both
| just proprietary software with some open-source components.
|
| Free Software Definition: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
| sw.html.en#four-freedoms
|
| Open-Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd
|
| Note that these are not definitions in the ordinary
| lexographical sense. They are terms that were created with
| explicit social and technical purposes in mind, by and for
| organized movements. This isn't an argument from the dictionary
| but a reminder of the purposes of these concepts.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| > VSCode is not open-source
|
| Partly true, partly false. VS Code is FOSS (MIT license). The
| VS Code binary that Microsoft distributes is freeware
| (proprietary license).
|
| > and neither is this extension
|
| Correct.
|
| > That's just proprietary, software plain and simple.
|
| Indeed, the Pylance extension is proprietary software.
|
| > In the way that third-party distributions of VSCode do not
| come with the same rights to extend the software or use it in
| combination with compatible extensions
|
| False. Third party distributions of VSCode can absolutely use
| compatible extensions. The license of certain proprietary
| extensions does not allow you to use them with third party
| distributions of VSCode.
|
| > It's not that your modified copies must give your users the
| same rights to inspect and modify the code as you had (that's
| copyleft) but that you are unable to give them such rights.
| MS does this not entirely through the licensing of VSCode but
| also through the licensing of certain extensions
|
| The VSCode license prevents you from reverse engineering,
| modifying it, and you agree to send some telemetry to
| Microsoft. You're correct that the MS distribution is not
| FOSS. It's the same with Chrome (the code base) and Chrome
| (the browser binaries that Google distributes).
|
| > Neither VSCode nor this extension is open-source.
|
| Again, to be clear: VSCode (the binary) is not OSS, but the
| source code used to build VSCode (the binary) *is* OSS.
| Pylance (the extension) is straight up proprietary software.
|
| > Note that these are not definitions in the ordinary
| lexographical sense. They are terms that were created with
| explicit social and technical purposes in mind, by and for
| organized movements. This isn't an argument from the
| dictionary but a reminder of the purposes of these concepts.
|
| The MIT license represents a different view on the social and
| technical goals of open source software. It's much simpler
| than the GPLs and only has one obligation for the
| user/redistributors: display a copyright notice. It's not as
| copyleft as the GPLs.
| lozenge wrote:
| Building the open source repo gets you something which
| isn't VSCode. It doesn't install a lot of VSCode
| extensions, therefore you shouldn't call it VSCode and
| shouldn't say VSCode is FOSS.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| This is very well put. If the open source repo was named
| "VSCodium" it would communicate better what is going on.
| (Chrome / Chromium.)
|
| Edit: to be clear, I think Microsoft should offer
| VSCodium themselves and state clearly that they take
| that, bundle it with other stuff, and are calling that
| blob VSCode.
| petre wrote:
| > I think Microsoft should offer VSCodium themselves
|
| The instant they do that I'm moving to Theia or something
| else (zed?). MS is not to be trusted, as outlined by this
| article.
| pxc wrote:
| Yes. I was a bit sloppy in using 'VSCode' to refer only to
| the thing distributed at code.visualstudio.com but also
| treating derivative works of what Microsoft calls 'Code -
| OSS' in their GitHub repo as defective (more limited)
| derivatives of 'VSCode'.
|
| > The MIT license represents a different view on the social
| and technical goals of open source software. It's much
| simpler than the GPLs and only has one obligation for the
| user/redistributors: display a copyright notice. It's not
| as copyleft as the GPLs.
|
| The MIT license is a tool used for a range of purposes, not
| an expression of values. It doesn't 'represent a view'
| about how software should be developed or distributed in
| the same way that documents like, e.g., the FSF's account
| of the four fundamental software freedoms, the OSI's Open-
| Source Definition, or the Debian Free Software Guidelines
| do. It sits at a different layer. Moreover, all of those
| documents incontestably include MIT-licensed software among
| the licenses that embody their values-- none of those
| organizations or movements they participate in exclude
| permissively licensed software.
|
| That some source code is distributed under the terms of the
| MIT license only tells us a little bit about the way and
| extent to which it is or isn't aligned with the values and
| touted benefits of either the free software movement or the
| open-source movement. There are individuals (and
| organizations, if you count the contributor bases of large,
| relatively organized software projects) who are interested
| in software freedom and/or open-source development but
| averse to copyleft, but permissive licenses don't
| themselves exclusively support only one set of values and
| goals or constitute a statement of allegiance to other
| doctrines (and neither do copyleft licenses).
|
| And that's part of what makes statements of values and
| ideas that go beyond licenses per se, like the ones I cited
| but also books like _Free Software, Free Society_ and _The
| Cathedral and the Bazaar_ , and the many shorter online
| documents one can find at FSF.org, EFF.org,
| sfconservancy.org, or even the OSI's policy advocacy work
| valuable: they transmit the things that copyright licenses
| cannot. They are reminders that adopting software and
| software development practices means making choices about
| entering into concrete relations of power, dependency,
| collaboration, and competition. The F/OSS licenses are
| instruments in service of meaningful choices about _those_
| things. And that 's exactly the way that my recourse to
| things like the Open-Source Definition and the FSF's
| article _What is Free Software_ was not to make a merely
| verbal dispute, arguing about what words mean, but a move
| to ground this discussion in the range of first-order
| values for which F /OSS licenses are instruments. That's
| something equally relevant and equally worth doing whether
| the licenses in question are maximally permissive (like the
| technically-not-a-license of donating a codebase to the
| public domain), strong copyleft licenses like AGPLv3, or
| something else like LGPL or MPL.
| awson wrote:
| AFAUI, this extension uses proprietary C++ front-end
| commercially licensed from EDG.
|
| The same front-end powers their Visual Studio IDE (not Code).
|
| Also, AFAIK, there exist an alternative `clangd`-based C++
| extension, which is fully open-source (but I could be wrong).
| gpderetta wrote:
| clangd is fully open source. You can build it yourself from
| llvm sources. It works fine with emacs LSP support. I never
| used the proprietary extension so I can't compare the
| functionality, stability nor speed.
| karl42 wrote:
| Debian splits their distribution into three components:
| * main (free software) * non-fee * contrib (free
| software that depends on software outside of main, so usually
| non-free software)
|
| While I am not fond of the "contrib" terminology, I think this
| categorization makes a lot of sense.
| okl wrote:
| Additionally, there is now `non-free-firmware`, e.g.,
| http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/non-free-
| firmware...
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Without proposing a model for how the 50+ full time employees who
| create VS Code justify their collective ~20MM annual budget, this
| sounds a lot like: "Ugh, they made it mildly inconvenient for my
| company to benefit from all their engineering work but swap out
| the product surface and reap the profits by undercutting their
| product via not needing to fund the engineering ourselves. How
| lame."
| kragen wrote:
| that's not my problem. my problem is making sure i don't make
| my own job skills dependent on microsoft's continued goodwill,
| because historically that has been a guaranteed path to
| obsolescence. i don't need their engineering work. i have
| emacs, vim, clang, gcc, idea, eclipse, firefox, and so on
|
| i'm only interested in microsoft's generous gift of blankets if
| they come without smallpox
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| You also have vscode. What you don't have is the various
| proprietary extensions msft makes to vscode, just as you
| don't have every proprietary extension anyone has ever made
| to those listed platforms.
| toofy wrote:
| > You also have vscode. What you don't have is the various
| proprietary extensions msft makes...
|
| i'm not trying to be confrontational i promise, but i mean,
| yeah, youre just repeating what we're discussing...
|
| microsoft bangs its drums chanting "please like us again,
| look at how open source we are. we're not the same abusive
| company we used to be... we've changed, really."
|
| to many of us, the extension ecosystem is the biggest thing
| separating code from other IDEs in the first place.
|
| this is just more abusive tactics from a company with very
| very long history of abuse, only this time they try to hide
| it behind empty "open source community, look how much we
| love you" rhetoric.
|
| i've always recommended to organizations to run fast and
| far from ms products. basically "if you're looking at a
| long timescale, you want agility, you want to be able to
| easily pivot in various other directions. if you use MS,
| you never know where they're going to lock you down. run
| fast and far from them." and this is just another example
| of why.
|
| i think the commenter above nailed it perfectly with, "they
| keep telling us we should be grateful for microsoft
| blankets infected with the smallpox."
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Software engineers have to be the most melodramatic lot
| in existence. Microsoft: you can use this product for
| your development work freely, but we have licensing in
| place that prevents redistribution that cuts out our core
| product offering because let's be real here this is
| really expensive to develop and both us and our employees
| have bills to pay just like anyone else.
|
| Internet personalities: the closest thing I might compare
| this to is the deliberate proliferation of smallpox and
| the resulting deaths of hundreds of thousands of native
| americans. (a story which, ironically, turns out to be
| almost entirely fabricated to spread FUD about the us
| government... https://allthatsinteresting.com/smallpox-
| blankets)
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >a story which, ironically, turns out to be almost
| entirely fabricated
|
| The same is true for the adage about boiling frogs, but
| it's still a useful analogy.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > let's be real here this is really expensive to develop
| and both us and our employees have bills to pay just like
| anyone else
|
| Couldn't put it better. FOSS advocates want everything
| for free and source code released every time, all the
| time. Who's paying the bills? The rent? The mortgage?
|
| To be precise, the system sucks, but we have to work
| within it, and that means profit-driven companies which
| pay employees liveable salaries so said employees can buy
| the food and shelter they need to experience a decent
| life.
|
| I'll bet that 95% of FOSS developers either contribute as
| part their full-time job, or already have full-time jobs
| with the salary and flexibility that allows them to also
| contribute to FOSS projects in their free time. Not
| everyone has this luxury.
| kragen wrote:
| i don't care. if you don't want to write free software,
| that's fine with me. but don't piss on my shoes and tell
| me it's raining, and don't offer me a gift and then
| demand payment
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > but don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining,
| and don't tell me it's a gift and then demand payment
|
| Who's doing this? VS Code is free; Pylance is free,
| cppdbg is free, the C# suite is free. However the
| licences are clear; these extensions are closed source.
|
| VS Code's core editor functionality (Monaco, LSP, DAP,
| etc) is fully open, and has been regularly repurposed and
| re-branded by several other companies. I sincerely don't
| see the problem. If someone else wants to write their own
| extensions, they are free to; these extensions are
| Microsoft's IP and hence Microsoft is free to do what it
| wants with its IP.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| It's just disingenuous for Microsoft to say, for example,
| the cpptools extension is MIT licensed, which it is.
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-
| cpptools?tab=License-1-o...
|
| In reality, it's a MIT-licensed wrapper. The real license
| is also included in the repository, just not the top
| level github license.
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-
| cpptools/blob/main/Runti...
|
| The disingenuity is what you are condoning. The repo is
| superficially organized to appear open-source but is
| actually a minefield.
|
| Github will sometimes say "found other licenses"; the
| best Github can do is to "report" on the state of a
| repository; it's up to the community to decide on
| stricter tolerances for declaring something to be open-
| source, because as we see here, even a major corporation
| is willing to engage in subterfuge/exploitation.
|
| Saying something is "open source" provides material
| benefit: it creates attention, it attracts users, it
| creates community. Shouldn't a project be fully in-the-
| spirit of open source to benefit?
|
| There's plenty of case law around the word "free"; it's
| just too early for the phrase "open source" to have
| settled case law.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Where has microsoft stated the cpp extension is MIT
| licensed?
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| (assuming you haven't somehow looked at a block of legal
| text, disregarded the opening paragraph, and assumed the
| rest of it somehow is to be interpreted in isolation?)
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > Software engineers have to be the most melodramatic lot
| in existence.
|
| They have _nothing_ on gamers.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >because historically that has been a guaranteed path to
| obsolescence
|
| Has it? If there's one good thing about Microsoft, it's that
| basically anything, even from the stone age, is still
| supported. You can fire up some executable from the 1990s on
| Windows and it works and you can probably just be a .net dev
| for the next 50 years if you want to. If there's one company
| in this industry that takes long term support and backwards
| compatibility seriously it's Microsoft
| 0dayz wrote:
| You're talking about the most broadest of broad experiences
| here, what about all the proprietary dev products that have
| been sunset which usually was design to keep in said
| developer in the walled garden?
| wvenable wrote:
| Nobody used them -- except maybe for Silverlight -- but
| we all know why that model (along with Flash) was
| retired.
| Mashimo wrote:
| I honestly don't know, but what are those?
| 0dayz wrote:
| Pretty much anything pre-Edge in the web world, I'm sure
| there are some deprecated Sharepoint predecessor and
| similar.
| kragen wrote:
| tell me more about how valuable my knowledge of mfc and
| visual basic 5 is now
|
| i mean, yes, the code still _runs_. but it 's not _useful_
| SleepyMyroslav wrote:
| while I like your point in general you might be wrong on
| MFC part at least a bit.
|
| Last time I checked one can still choose optional MFC
| component of desktop development in vs installer and it
| will let you build old code with latest toolchain and do
| maintenance. Not that it makes any sense in 2024 but its
| still there.
|
| ps. I've been hitting F5 every working day in vs for
| entire career and have no plans to switch to anything
| else =)
| kragen wrote:
| haha https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/maste
| r/init.e...
|
| agreed
| iLemming wrote:
| > takes long term support and backwards compatibility
| seriously it's Microsoft
|
| Silverlight, Internet Explorer, Windows Phone, Microsoft
| Edge (Legacy), Windows Media Center, Microsoft Expression,
| Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Zune, Kinect, Cortana (on mobile
| devices), Groove Music, Windows Mobile, FrontPage, ActiveX,
| Visual Basic 6, Windows XP, Windows 7, Skype for Business
| (being replaced by Teams), Office Picture Manager, DCOM,
| Winforms (considered legacy), .NET Remoting (superseded by
| WCF), WCF itself now considered largely obsolete, Classic
| ASP.NET (Web Forms), etc.
|
| While Microsoft does offer LTS for core products, they also
| regularly obsolete technologies, often driven by market
| changes or strategic shifts. Their rate of obsolescence is
| comparable to other major tech companies.
| electronbeam wrote:
| Too many people love smallpox, especially the younger croud
| who missed the early 2000s
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Please elaborate
| pjmlp wrote:
| Naturally you also generously support emacs, vim, clang, gcc,
| idea, eclipse, firefox, and so on for them making your
| livehood possible, selling your skills.
| kragen wrote:
| no; i provide some support for some of them, but the nature
| of software is that it is infinitely replicable, so in
| general the efforts of a few suffice to satisfy the needs
| of many
|
| mostly what i offer 'in return' is more free software,
| which is also how, for example, the vim and gcc teams
| support each other, for the most part
|
| i'm surprised to see your comment because i thought you
| were old enough to know this already
| pjmlp wrote:
| I am old enough to see too many devs abandon open source
| because it doesn't pay the bills, contrary to the old
| promises of everyone singing happy songs around the
| fireplace on a comunity farm kind of ideas.
|
| And also to remember Public Domain and the various
| flavours of Shareware and Demos, which is what Open
| Core/Dual Licensing are nowadays, by another name.
| kragen wrote:
| sure, plenty of people have always abandoned open source
| for that reason. running a free software business isn't
| easy. fortunately, the nature of open source is that it
| doesn't depend on any one person or group, so it keeps
| working when people abandon it. it's worth noting that
| over the last 30 years this has worked so well that
| almost all software of consequence is open-source now,
| which is why we aren't having this discussion on msn in
| blackbird or on compuserve
|
| i agree that open-core is little more than shareware.
| dual-licensing is a different model, one pioneered by
| peter deutsch in the early 90s
|
| this is ground we explored extensively on the fsb mailing
| list in the late 90s. if you're interested in my current
| thinking on the relationship between markets and open-
| source knowledge sharing, i've just written a somewhat
| longer note at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696527
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Which is a can of worms by itself which we saw this year
| with xz-utils.
| kragen wrote:
| yes, and we are going to see a lot more of that,
| unfortunately. heartbleed was another somewhat similar
| case, and though the debian openssl hole was probably
| accidental, nobody will ever be able to prove that
| conclusively
| talldayo wrote:
| Most of us are old enough to have seen too many devs
| abandon iOS and Android for being head-up-ass terrible
| solutions.
|
| I don't know what solution you're promoting because Free
| Software still works. The professional for-profit
| software industry is in the toilet right now - Open
| Source is destroying it in a certain for-profit purview.
| gregmac wrote:
| It's an IDE. If you need to edit your code somewhere else,
| there's a billion other IDEs and text editors, as you pointed
| out.
|
| A guitar doesn't make the musician, and the hammer doesn't
| make the carpenter.
|
| There's specific skill with being able to use tools well, but
| that's not what makes a programmer, guitarist or carpenter
| valuable.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > A guitar doesn't make the musician, and the hammer
| doesn't make the carpenter.
|
| Is that why famous guitarists play only on specific
| expensive brands and professional carpenters have favorite
| instruments?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Is that why famous guitarists play only on specific
| expensive brands...
|
| But that isn't true. Lots of famous guitarists play, and
| love, the cheap guitar they had before they made it big.
| Yeah they own lots of expensive guitars (because they
| like collecting guitars and are rich enough to do it).
| But they don't _only_ play those.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Sure we all have our favorite tools, but if something
| happened to code, we could adapt to one of the other
| options in a fortnight.
| onion2k wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with having a favorite. That's not
| the same as only being able to use that specific brand. A
| good guitarist can play any good instrument well, just as
| a good developer should be able to write good software in
| an IDE that isn't their preferred one. The favorite tool
| just makes them a bit better; it isn't _required_ to do
| the job.
| wcrossbow wrote:
| Famous guitarists mostly only play specific expensive
| brands because they are endorsed by them. Any
| professional musician can make the cheapest of
| instruments sound really good. Maybe a note is missed
| here or there and the sound is not as good as it could be
| but it will still be way way better than an average
| player.
|
| Here is Satriani playing on a terribly setup guitar [1]
| His only comment at the end? Oh, that was a little
| painful.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KZjVZLsU6s&t=20s
| iLemming wrote:
| Although it is an interesting thought experiment, to a
| certain degree, I don't think it's right to compare
| musical instruments and IDEs.
|
| IDEs are usually far more complex due to their vast
| feature sets and constant evolution. If guitars evolved
| and increased in complexity at the same rate as IDEs, we
| would've seen something absurd like James Hetfield
| wielding a 150-string monster guitar.
|
| IDEs have become incredibly complex tools with features
| that go far beyond the original concept of text editing,
| while guitars have remained relatively consistent in
| their core design and function over decades.
|
| We don't have to keep practicing typing "the quick brown
| fox jumped over the lazy dog" over and over again to
| master an IDE, while you have to play same tunes again
| and again to become a virtuoso. Experienced musicians
| often have a broader, more adaptable skill set and can
| change instruments, while IDE users might be more "locked
| in" to their preferred environment for various reasons.
|
| I agree with your sentiment though - good programmers are
| good not because they've mastered their tools - they
| chose to master their tools because they are good
| programmers.
| kragen wrote:
| > _a 150-string monster guitar_
|
| almost all pianos have more strings than that; the bottom
| octave or so have two strings each and the rest of the
| keys have three strings each, for a total of somewhere
| around 250 strings. pipe organs are routinely
| significantly more complex than that. but a lot of the
| elaboration in musical instruments doesn't take the form
| of increasing the number of parts; instead we have things
| like special varnishes, holes cut in particular shapes,
| special alloys for strings, tweaked electronic circuit
| designs, tweaked magnetic pickup designs, etc. i'm not
| sure it would be easier for a random person to learn how
| to make a stratocaster-competitive electric guitar than
| it would be for them to learn how to write an emacs-
| competitive ide
|
| as for lazy dogs, i think it's common for both
| programmers and musicians to practice etudes, not just
| for instrument mastery (which is only a small part of the
| problem both in programming and in music). a typing class
| in eighth grade was enormously helpful to me in
| programming even though, as everyone knows, typing is
| only rarely the bottleneck in programming. and i think
| it's pretty common for programmers to spend time on
| practicing the effective use of one ide feature or
| another, watch screencasts of other programmers using
| them, buy books about particular ides, etc. check out htt
| ps://www.vimgolf.com/challenges/9v0062d0773d000000000225
| http://vimcasts.org/
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDIQ17T3sRk
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGrBHohIgQY
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p09i_hoFdd0 etc.
| iLemming wrote:
| Okay, yeah, I see where you're going with this. I guess,
| you can compare IDEs and musical instruments, in many
| aspects, there's more overlap in two areas.
| kragen wrote:
| much of what you learn programming in an ide is how to
| program, but some of it is how to use the ide, and it's
| common for programmers to keep using the same ide for
| decades as a result
|
| i still have some keybindings in emacs from when i used
| visual c++ last millennium, and i'm probably using emacs in
| significant part because i started using lugaru epsilon in
| about 01989. since then i've also used vi, vim, idea,
| eclipse, nedit, and the f83 editor, but i keep ending up
| back in emacs sort of by default. and i think my level of
| flexibility on this count is far above average
|
| see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696512 for a
| more in-depth exploration of this
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > A guitar doesn't make the musician, and the hammer
| doesn't make the carpenter.
|
| A good guitar player or a good carpenter sure as shit know
| a good tool from a bad tool. Good tools are force
| multipliers and can can make somebody much better than
| without the tool.
|
| Plus bad tools can actively keep people away from learning
| new things. A shitty soldering iron can absolutely convince
| somebody they suck at soldering. Sure a pro can make use of
| a shitty soldering iron but they won't do it willingly and
| their output will be subpar. Same with cooking and bad
| knives. Same with anything.
|
| The argument that "tools don't make somebody good" is
| pretty silly. They absolutely do.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| Remember folks, when Apple says that a video they present
| is "shot on iPhone" it comes with many many many
| disclaimers.
| gregmac wrote:
| > The argument that "tools don't make somebody good" is
| pretty silly. They absolutely do.
|
| I disagree, but only because I'd rephrase what you're
| saying as "good tools are force multipliers for skilled
| people". You can give a beginner musician the most
| expensive guitar rig, and they'll still sound like a
| beginner.
|
| I also never said what you're arguing against. The GP was
| essentially complaining that using vscode would hamstring
| their career because their skill would be in something
| Microsoft could take away. What I was trying to say is
| the reason programmers get paid isn't because they're
| good at using their IDE, it's because they're good at
| programming. I believe the GP's concern is misplaced.
|
| Consider: Do you go to a restaurant because their chef
| uses expensive high-end knives, or because they have good
| food?
| kragen wrote:
| that is _not_ what i was complaining about, essentially
| or otherwise; you can resolve your unfortunate confusion
| by reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695702,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41699450,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695744,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696512, or
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695764, all of
| which i posted before your comment above in which you
| baselessly attribute to me the most brain-damaged
| knuckle-dragging strawman viewpoint possible
|
| i wrote one of those comments specifically in response to
| your comment, in order to correct your misreading of
| mine, so you really have no excuse whatsoever for not
| having read it
| dark-star wrote:
| Your skills as a developer are never dependent on the tools,
| APIs or platforms you use. You can always abstract over that.
| But yes, effectively _using_ your skills will always be
| somewhat dependent on some company 's goodwill. If a product,
| platform or feature you use goes away, you need to switch.
| That doesn't only happen for development IDEs. It's a process
| of learning that happens (or should happen) continuously in
| any line of work, and especially in software development.
|
| As a developer you should already be used to having to switch
| stuff to something else. Going from DX12 to Vulcan, from x86
| to RISC-V, from Linux to FreeBSD, from XCode to EMACS, from
| Perl to Python, from Angular to Flask, whatever.
| kragen wrote:
| yes! always be learning! and learning how to think and
| create, not just how to operate tools
|
| however, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695702
|
| inevitably some of your learning efforts are sunk into the
| tools, apis, and platforms you use. those can compound over
| time, making you more effective for the rest of your life,
| or simply be a pleasant memory. spending time on tools,
| apis, and platforms that are _not_ dependent on some
| company 's goodwill is helpful here; none of vulkan, x86,
| risc-v, linux, freebsd, emacs, perl, python, angular, or
| flask is dependent on any single company
|
| (x86? yes, without amd, x86 would have died around 02000
| like most other 80s architectures did, killed by intel's
| itanic blunder.)
|
| in the 90s i invested time learning a lot of different
| tools and platforms. most of them are no longer useful to
| me because they were dependent on some company or other:
| vax, vax/vms, informix, netapp, mfc, sunos 4, purify,
| clearcase, pv-wave idl, erdas imagine, khoros cantata,
| irix, windows nt 3.51, cde. but, for the most part, those
| that were open standards (or, better still, free software)
| remain useful to me to this day: diff and patch, shellutils
| (now coreutils), tcp/ip, perl, netbsd, emacs, python, html,
| css, the i386 architecture, bash, vim, c, c++, sql, gcc,
| gdb, samba, ssh, postscript, tcl, tk, etc.
|
| admittedly x.25, smtp, ftp, perl, tcl, twm, and fvwm are
| not as useful these days, and visual c++ and win32 are
| still somewhat useful. so it's not 100% black and white.
| but the longevity difference is extremely striking
| gosub100 wrote:
| I didn't read the article but I could absolutely see MS doing
| something shady to promote their AI racket: beginning next
| year, VSCode Basic edition will remain free, but to use
| Premium AI Cloud additions will cost just $6/month for a
| basic plan. (Then shoehorn intellisense and a bunch of other
| features that used to work fine into the "AI" paywall,
| because it's 2024 and words don't mean anything anymore).
|
| Or more likely, "the free version will now contain ads and
| mandatory telemetry, pay to upgrade to premium for a more
| streamlined experience". Just like the Mafia, create the
| problem then sell your their solution.
| LaGrange wrote:
| Their business model being bad is not my concern. They're not a
| broke kid whose bad decisions I'm exploiting.
|
| Edit: OTOH reporting on this as if it's a grand surprise is a
| bit funny. Like come on, this was obvious from the start. I
| just didn't care, it didn't feel like a fight worth fighting.
| And I care about BSD/MIT license devs being exploited about as
| much as MS' business model potentially falling apart because I
| turn off telemetry: folks knew what they're going into, and did
| it anyway because "sempai corpo will notice us." Well, it did,
| congratulations.
|
| As for me, I don't care. I ain't posting anything on anything
| lighter than AGPL, ever, but I'm a small bean and ultimately
| there's stuff I care about way more than software.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Their business model is fine, and telemetry has nothing to do
| with it. The telemetry aspect of the article is a red herring
| the author introduced seemingly to elicit more popular
| support on their website and others like it. The core issue
| has nothing to to with telemetry and everything to do with
| licensing and intellectual property.
| yazzku wrote:
| Nothing should be built with a Microsoft product as its
| foundation. It's not even a mystery how such endeavours end.
| vunuxodo wrote:
| You could say the same about Google:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| Said by someone who writes Flutter for a living :/
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Microsoft has far more experience than Google at having
| strategies.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Say what you want about microsoft, but it protects its
| developers by making sure they get paid, and it also does so
| for third party developers who target Microsoft.
|
| I'd rather get paid than build towards an ideal bunny world of
| free as in free beer software.
|
| developers developers developers
| sham1 wrote:
| I feel that people rather care about the free as in free
| speech world, rather than the free as in free beer world.
|
| Plus, for the former you can still get paid. You don't need
| proprietary software for that.
| TZubiri wrote:
| There's a bait and switch. For users free software is about
| not having a cost associated, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Google
| and Youtube, Whatsapp, ChatGpt, they all compete in the
| same category of software that doesn't have a cost.
|
| Now for developers, they are recruited to build software
| under the guise of freedom, while their users care not
| about the men who die for the cause, and only appreciate
| the free stuff.
|
| The argument that you can still get paid developing free
| software is obtuse. Source code is a very valuable tool to
| protect intellectual property (which is a recognized legal
| asset despite what stallman would like to be the case). If
| you sacrificie your source code advantage by making it
| public (which is a requisite for free software, put down
| your "Free software isn't open source" paragraph gun), then
| you give away most of your capacity to make money out of
| your skill. Furthermore, open source development and closed
| source development are two very different skillsets, so you
| kind of get locked in to a worse paid form of software
| (with the exception of the top 0.01% of developers who
| might net evangelizing positions at actual proprietary
| companies like Guido Van)
| erm4n wrote:
| But you can totally charge for free (as in free speech)
| software. While you're required to provide the source
| code to those who pay you to use the software, you don't
| have to provide it to those who haven't paid. You could
| also charge for each update and only provide the versions
| that the user has paid for.
|
| Also what do you have to say to the open-source projects
| that take a "dual licensing" approach, like how Google
| profits from creating their own proprietary browser
| Chrome that has more features than the open-source
| Chromium? Isn't it practical for companies to freely
| provide an open-source version with fewer features and
| sell a better, proprietary version? I havnen't done any
| of this, but to me it sounds like there's plenty of ways
| to make money developing open-source software.
| TZubiri wrote:
| "While you're required to provide the source code to
| those who pay you to use the software, you don't have to
| provide it to those who haven't paid."
|
| The issue is that you give away your source code to your
| clients and competitors, who can then save money by not
| paying you.
|
| If you don't give them source code, whether by
| distributing binaries or access to a server which holds
| the code, you can recoup the investment by ensuring
| clients only get the benefit of your software when they
| pay.
|
| It's a similar dilemma in the pharma industry, yes you
| can free the patents and publish the synthesis method,
| but who is gonna pay the researchers?
|
| Finally Chrome is more of a byproduct of google's efforts
| to scrape the internet, turns out that in order to figure
| out what a website is showing a user you need to pretty
| much develop a full fledged browser. The goal of google
| was never to develop a browser.
| TZubiri wrote:
| "Also what do you have to say to the open-source projects
| that take a "dual licensing" approach, like how Google
| profits from creating their own proprietary browser
| Chrome that has more features than the open-source
| Chromium?"
|
| Critically, Google doesn't sell or charge for Chrome
| access.
|
| Their monetization model is making software free (as in
| beer) in exchange for advertising. Again, that funky word
| free.
|
| Regarding imitating that model, you and me are not
| google, and will more likely fail than not if we were to
| pursue that model.
| golergka wrote:
| As a whole section of tech sector that builds a lot of useful
| tools and products exclusively on Microsoft stack? I understand
| that Windows Server, MS SQL Server and ASP .Net folks are less
| represented in the HN crowd, but pretending that most of them
| regret their tech stack decisions is absurd.
| kaushikc wrote:
| Old ways die harder
|
| Paul Maritz also explained to Intel representatives that
| Microsoft's response to the browser threat was to "embrace,
| extend, extinguish"; in other words, Microsoft planned to
| "embrace" existing Internet standards, "extend" them in
| incompatible ways, and thereby "extinguish" competitors.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/atr/file/705216/dl
| dangus wrote:
| I think the level of alarmism is way overblown especially from
| the author's perspective coming from Gitpod.
|
| There's so much focus on how Microsoft has this huge advantage
| with VSCode and GitHub Codespaces as a cohesive product.
|
| But I think that this entire cloud coding workstation space is
| rather niche in itself.
|
| I think the average user of VSCode, VSCodium, or whatever other
| fork has full flexibility to not use Microsoft's preferred
| extensions and solutions and customize their environment.
|
| All this stuff about fracturing an ecosystem basically amounts to
| picking default extensions and I just don't know if this is one
| of those "abuse of market power" things yet.
|
| I mean, sure, it can be said that it's bad how Microsoft is so
| large that it can single-handedly steer the course of a lot of
| development trends.
|
| At the same time, I don't think VSCode being such a good product
| was something that came out of Microsoft's dominance. They had a
| lot of luck with that one, they had the right idea, people, and
| management at the right time. Microsoft makes plenty of software
| where their big company big dollar investment hasn't made them a
| market leader and they have a laundry list of failures and
| technologies that are trending downward to show for it.
|
| I would agree with another comment on this thread: it really does
| seem like a bunch of complaining from some cloud workspace
| competitors who want to get a free IDE for themselves that works
| perfectly.
| kragen wrote:
| if your competitors can't sell your product, it isn't open
| source.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Fundamentally, this mindset and flaw in the definition is why
| open source can't prevail. Because open source is absolutely
| committed to being unsustainable.
| kragen wrote:
| on the contrary; it's absolutely committed to not being
| dependent on a vendor, because being dependent on a vendor
| makes software unsustainable
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| You miss the point. "Open source is not a business model"
| but also the OSI has made it increasingly clear it
| doesn't want it to even be possible to make a business
| model on top of open source software.
|
| That means companies will be, regardless of the desire
| otherwise, forced into proprietary models, and
| proprietary development will continue to be the most
| effective way to put food on the table.
|
| Open source will forever be a niche volunteer thing plus
| some predatory abuse by monopolies because the OSI is not
| interested in open source being the default way to make
| software.
| hollerith wrote:
| >the OSI has made it increasingly clear it doesn't want
| it to even be possible to make a business model on top of
| open source
|
| The OSI's definition of open source was worked out in the
| 1990s and has changed almost not at all. That stability
| in the meaning of "open source" (or "OSI-approved", if
| you want to be precise) is a good thing. If you want to
| experiment with software licenses that (like open source)
| don't lock the user in or that (like open source) allow
| forking, but that are better than open source at allowing
| the maintainer to earn money, then please do -- just
| don't call your experiment open source. Coin another
| term.
|
| It is not some awful tragedy that those who want to
| experiment with software licenses cannot use the
| reputation of the "open source" label to market their
| offerings.
|
| Parenthetically, "nice volunteer thing" is not an
| accurate description of AOSP, Chromium, Firefox and most
| Linux desktop software.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > AOSP, Chromium, Firefox
|
| All exploitative projects entirely funded and mostly
| operated by a monopoly found violating the law or
| awaiting judgment for such in almost every single first
| world jurisdiction.
|
| Also neither AOSP nor Chromium are used in the real world
| in practice, over 99.99% of users use proprietary forks.
|
| In other words, thank you for supporting my statement
| entirely.
|
| > Linux desktop software
|
| Yeah, definitely "not niche".
| hollerith wrote:
| >Also neither AOSP nor Chromium are used in the real
| world in practice, over 99.99% of users use proprietary
| forks.
|
| I didn't think it needed spelling out, but OK: GrapheneOS
| would not exist if AOSP didn't have an open-source
| license. Electron, Microsoft Edge and Brave browser
| wouldn't exist if Chromium hadn't been released on open-
| source terms.
|
| Surely it is not your claim that because Google has done
| bad things, nothing that Google has ever done has ever
| been positive?
|
| Going back to your previous comment, where you write,
| "the OSI is not interested in open source being the
| default way to make software."
|
| Do you actually believe that if the OSI had been smarter
| or more ethical or had listened to your advice (sent back
| in time perhaps) then open source might have become the
| default way to make software?
|
| I consider it obvious that that was never a possibility.
| kragen wrote:
| possibly you are a time traveler because in this timeline
| open source _did_ become the default way to make software
| hollerith wrote:
| OK, my previous comment was clumsy (and I concede that
| most of the software on the machine I'm using to write
| this is open source). What I meant to do with my previous
| comment was point out that my interlocutor seems to
| believe that the situation in software is just terrible,
| which implies that if things had gone different, it could
| be a lot better. But I'm not able to imagine a realistic
| evolution in which software ends up in a much better
| place than the current status quo.
| kragen wrote:
| it's been much worse in the past, so we know it can be
| much worse. probably at the time it was hard to imagine
| the evolution to where we are now, so maybe it can get
| much better too. certainly i had no idea 30 years ago
| where we'd be now
| hollerith wrote:
| OK, then let's focus on the fact that my interlocutor
| seems to believe he can _see_ how to make it much better
| than it is now, which is very different from its being
| possible, but none of us in this conversation can see how
| to do it with any confidence.
| kragen wrote:
| i think it's reasonable for him to try different things
| to try to make it better, but i share your lack of
| confidence in his proposed course of action, particularly
| since he seems to have such a hazy understanding of what
| has been tried already ;)
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Really making this easy for me. Here we go!
|
| > GrapheneOS would not exist if AOSP didn't have an open-
| source license
|
| First, Graphene OS is used by... less than 0.01% of
| Android users, so again, thank you for confirming my
| point. Furthermore, _GrapheneOS is harmful for the
| ecosystem._ Similar to VSCode, proprietary services are
| essentially gated out from alternatives to the default
| proprietary Android. And the big problem with Graphene
| and other AOSP forks, is they _waste developer effort
| while protecting monopolies_. Every developer-hour
| _wasted_ on Graphene is a developer-hour not spent on a
| truly open mobile OS, and that 's sad.
|
| > Electron
|
| We could live without it. Nobody needs a whole browser to
| ship a single page app. But also...
|
| > Microsoft Edge and Brave browser wouldn't exist
|
| So remember that whole part where I said 99.99% of use is
| the proprietary forks? Edge is, of course, completely
| proprietary. (Brave is just a cryptocurrency grift, will
| focus on Edge here.) Microsoft is a monopoly in several
| respects still, and Edge adds several anti-features like
| ads on the start page and shopping "features" which
| collect your shopping behavior. Furthermore, the switch
| to Chromium for Edge _makes the Internet ecosystem
| worse_. Because one of the largest independent web
| rendering engines disappeared overnight... further
| contributing to Google 's monopoly stranglehold over the
| web ecosystem, and it's ability to essentially force
| standards bodies to comply with it's choices or become
| irrelevant.
|
| > if the OSI had been smarter or more ethical
|
| I think time travel conjecture is sort of pointless,
| obviously there are dozens of conditions on when good
| licenses got approved, what projects adopted them, etc.
| But if SSPL was approved, as the viral copyleft license
| it is, less open alternatives would evaporate overnight.
| Without the risk Amazon would lift your product, wrap it
| in a proprietary platform, and simultaneously undercut
| you on cost, I think at least for SaaS, there'd be very
| little reason for a business to launch without providing
| their code on fair terms.
|
| All that being said, the discourse around the OSI and
| open source is toxic enough and compromised enough, I
| think shifting to new terms is ideal anyways. I saw
| https://fair.io/ "fair source" recently, which seems
| quite reasonable, though I'd love to also see an
| expression of it more focused around labor and
| sustainability in addition to just business case.
| Developers deserve to get paid for their work, and I feel
| the primary goal of open source at this point is to
| cultivate free labor for the tech monopolies backing the
| OSI.
| kragen wrote:
| the osi was founded by people who built their businesses
| on open-source software, with whom i talked about it in
| detail at the time. despite entrenched resistance from,
| among others, proprietary software vendors and the
| iranian government, open source became the default way to
| make software about ten years ago. in large part that's
| because it's much better at limiting predatory abuse from
| monopolies than proprietary software is, so large users
| commonly choose open-source software even when
| proprietary alternatives look better on paper
|
| i think you're missing not only the point but actually
| reality as a whole
| muppetman wrote:
| But you can sell Vscode if you want? Fork it like VSCodium
| and sell vsmoneycode. You can't sell all the addons, but this
| is a business model heaps of people use (open product, closed
| modules/addons)
| greyman wrote:
| >But you can sell Vscode if you want? -> yes you
| technically can but in practice it's almost impossible to
| be competitive, since for several major languages the best
| extension isn't open source. Author called it a "fracture".
| re-thc wrote:
| > But I think that this entire cloud coding workstation space
| is rather niche in itself.
|
| It's common / popular in certain enterprise circles, for
| "security" and audit reasons. No admin or most permissions on
| your computer. You get a specific VM with "controls". Anything
| required might be installed on request.
|
| A locked down cloud hosted IDE might just be 1000% easier.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| I've only seen it used for outsourced staff in big
| enterprises, but yeah - security and compliance.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| People when a piece of software is source-available but not
| strictly OSS: _outrage_
|
| People when Microsoft pulls this trick (core repo OSS, most
| useful things around it are full of DRM and legal traps):
| _silence_
|
| The hypocrisy is really astounding and in a way, MS has managed
| to pacify even the strongest FOSS advocates by offering something
| which _looks_ like OSS but it actually isn 't. This is on par
| with claiming that a repo is GPL but the build API keys are not.
| (Yes, this also happened elsewhere, and not even in a corporate
| project at all!)
|
| The Open Source Definition is hilariously unfit for purpose in
| 2024 because it allows shenanigans like this.
|
| If you enjoy a rabbithole, look at how much DRM there is in
| Pylance (another extension that MS has locked down):
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/discussions/1641
|
| The short summary is that MS uses multiple, constantly changing
| methods of DRM to make it impossible for people to patch out the
| "only official VSCode" check from the Pylance extension. This is
| very clearly malicious.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Is this comment meant to apply generally to MS behavior? In my
| experience, MS faces some of the toughest judgment on anything
| related to OSS.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Absolutely, this is not just a random tangential comment!
| With a bit of searching, any time criticism of VSCode comes
| up, it's shrugged off with "it's OSS!". Even from people who
| use Linux, a substantial proportion of programmers bring out
| the OSS card to deflect criticism of these exploitative
| practices.
|
| (Example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comme
| nts/v3n8w4/wou... but this sentiment is really ubiquitous)
| rectang wrote:
| Hmm.
|
| Source Available is fine by me so long as it isn't being
| misrepresented as Open Source in an attempt to sponge off of
| the goodwill generated by Open Source communities. So I'm not
| feeling the "outrage".
|
| And I spent a good portion of my open source advocacy
| activities on license compliance at the ASF, helping projects
| to ensure that even with all the bundled dependencies the
| aggregate licensing of the distributed artifacts complied with
| the terms of the Apache License Version 2.0. So I'm not feeling
| that "silence" either.
|
| What I'm feeling is "hypocrisy" being projected onto a straw
| man by someone who's got an axe to grind with OSI and the Open
| Source Definition.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| I concede the last part, it _is_ slightly a soapbox from my
| part about the OSI. However, it 's not really a strawman
| because these issues are very much linked together. The
| definition itself is very strict yet not comprehensive -
| false positives and false negatives are both common.
|
| The sentiment that "VSCode is OSI-compliant so it's morally
| okay to support it" is very common, and it's substantially
| derived from the OSI definition. I do not think that it's an
| irrelevant issue or that it would be misrepresenting the
| definition.
|
| Is it really free (as in freedom) software when it contains
| DRM? Is it really open source when critical extensions are
| unusable if you build the software for yourself? It might
| meet the definition strictly by the words but in my view,
| this is not much better than TiVo-isation (when the license
| is adhered to but the user can't effectively use a modified
| version) or other shady practices.
| skybrian wrote:
| No moral qualms here. There are large pieces of it that are
| useful without VS Code (for example, the Monaco editor and
| the language server protocol). Not to mention al the use
| people get out of it for free. It seems like the good well
| outweighs the bad.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| >It seems like the good well outweighs the bad.
|
| Oh, I definitely agree. While I don't use the editor
| (mainly because I prefer full IDEs and not glorified text
| editors personally) I agree that holistically, the
| existence of VSC is a net positive to the programming
| community. My argument comes from a moral perspective -
| even though the good outweighs the bad, the bad parts are
| _really_ scummy and need more awareness.
|
| Like, my perspective is not utilitarian, it comes from a
| deontological point of view. I see people and companies
| get regularly flamed (or even harassed/intimidated) for
| much smaller things such as the crime of creating their
| non-OSI-compliant licenses and various related things. In
| contrast to that, the VS Code ecosystem is much more
| proprietary, grants much less practical freedoms and
| operates from a way less clean moral background than any
| of these projects. Yet, many people are willing to excuse
| this because Microsoft has figured out a way to implement
| vendor lock-in without breaching any of the four freedoms
| in techicality. To me, this is way worse than someone
| saying "no we won't let you use our software for
| _anything_ "...
|
| I am also not a fan of the LSP (good arguments can be
| found in https://www.michaelpj.com/blog/2024/09/03/lsp-
| good-bad-ugly....) but that's another topic :)
| rectang wrote:
| > crime of creating their non-OSI-compliant licenses
|
| Just don't call it "Open Source" and you won't get nearly
| as many complaints.
|
| The big problem arises when somebody tries to leech off
| of the goodwill built up by Open Source communities and
| give their Source Available proprietary offering some
| FOSS-juice. (Most often VC-backed companies who have
| failed to understand that "Open Source is not a business
| model").
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Well, this thread is getting off-topic real fast but
| okay, I'll reply :)
|
| This argument would make sense from a strictly logical
| perspective if these were all the facts but the problem
| is that the expression "open source" wayyyy predates the
| OSI. It's been used in the 80s and the 90s on Usenet and
| in various places, and it simply meant software which was
| distributed in source code form. (as opposed to binary
| form) These pieces of software didn't even have a license
| file attached to them which was implicitly understood as
| public domain, or "do whatever the fuck you want to do
| with it".
|
| The OSI simply appropriated the term to a narrower,
| stricter meaning which grants certain freedoms to the
| user and takes certain freedoms away from the creator.
| (Such as the freedom to change your mind in licensing!
| You can't practically change your mind since these are
| all non-revocable grants)
|
| Furthermore, I don't really agree with the "leeching off
| the goodwill of OSS" framing. From a practical
| perspective as a user, having the source code available
| is way closer to OSI-licensed software than proprietary,
| closed-source software. You can view the code of the
| program, you can usually share your modifications with
| others (which is technically disallowed but the
| developers are very unlikely to care as long as you don't
| resell it), you can fix bugs in it, you can change
| functionality you don't like. A less-commonly talked
| about side effect is that if the source is available, the
| developers are less incentivised to provide user-hostile
| features, simply because they know that the users can
| patch it out relatively easily. There's many cases of
| rugpulls and forced functionality changes in software
| nowadays and almost all of it is possible because the
| user can't simply change the code to change the unwanted
| behaviour but must put up with it instead.
|
| Naturally, this is a huge advantage compared to closed-
| source software. And if a company is willing to share its
| source code with its users, this should be lauded and
| encouraged! Obviously, the developers want some benefit
| from sharing the code, and one of the huge benefits is
| goodwill by customers. If the developers are not
| incentivised - but more commonly, harassed and mocked -
| to share their source but disallow competitors to steal
| it, in most cases, they will simply not share the code at
| all, leaving you, as a user, with way less freedom in
| practical terms.
|
| Both you and the company can't really do anything with
| paper freedoms - you can't really use paper freedoms and
| the company can't survive if their licensing permits
| others to profit off their work while discouraging them
| of doing so. In this view, having more _practical_
| freedoms should be encouraged because it helps both the
| user in having more usable and more modifiable software,
| and helps the developers not to go bankrupt when Amazon
| decides to commoditise their offering or something.
|
| EDIT: I conflated "developer" with "company" when writing
| this post. My apologies. Of course, everything above also
| applies to natural people who develop software too, not
| just corporations. I made this mistake because of the
| subject matter (Microsoft), sorry.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > users can patch it out relatively easily.
|
| This applies to the situation where the users are
| programmers. And I am a programmer. But I have never and
| probably never will modify any open-source applications I
| may be using. Too much work. Some library-code perhaps
| but not a full application (like VSCode).
|
| Too easy to cause more errors rather than fixing them,
| creating a dependency to my own modifications. When it
| becomes time to upgrade to the next version of such OS
| software I will need to merge my modifications to the
| official app or library, and there is no guarantee that
| my modification would be compatible with the latest
| version of the said software. If it is not compatible
| that means either more work for me, or that I can't
| upgrade.
| growse wrote:
| You specific having the time/resources is not the point.
| The point is that for users with the resources, they have
| the freedom to do this (either themselves or by hiring
| someone).
|
| "I don't have the resources to exercise my freedoms"
| might be a problem for you, but it's not a problem caused
| by the freedom or the mechanic granting it.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Right, freedoms are great. But my point is such a freedom
| is not very valuable to anybody else than programmers, or
| rich people and companies who can afford to hire them.
|
| And even for programmers like me it is not very valuable,
| especially if we're talking about sw-applications like
| VSC as opposed to library code.
| growse wrote:
| The nice thing about society is that it allows people to
| come together and pool their resources, in order to
| achieve an expensive thing that no individual might be
| able to reasonably afford.
|
| I get that nice things that you want are sometimes
| expensive, but that's just life, isn't it? The world
| doesn't owe you a cheap-and-easy-to-hack-on piece of
| software.
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't believe the _term_ "open source" was used much
| before a certain meeting in 1998 [1] when it was
| suggested as an alternative to "free software." Some
| people say it predates that meeting, but I haven't seen
| clear evidence. Do you have examples where it was used?
|
| On the other hand, people were using licenses that are
| now called "open source" licenses well before that, so
| the _practice_ certainly precedes the term. Also, the OSI
| definitions were derived from the Debian Free Software
| guidelines.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www
| .openso...
| rectang wrote:
| Of course the topic of spirit-vs-letter of Open Source is
| worth discussing. (I've personally meditated quite a lot on
| "open governance" vs. "open source", which is tangential
| but related).
|
| But I think your portrayal of FOSS advocates at large as
| unconcerned about the spirit vs. letter of open source
| compliance is wildly inaccurate. If anything FOSS
| communities discuss such topics obsessively. (How many bits
| have been spilled onto the internet about TiVo-isation?)
|
| Also, see pxc's excellent analysis elsethread for an
| illustration of the utility of the OSD:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693457
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Thank you for your insight, I really appreciate it!
|
| >If anything FOSS communities discuss such topics
| obsessively.
|
| I don't see this the same way. Whenever topics like these
| come up, "quoting the OSI definition word-by-word" is a
| fairly a common moral argument. (See every Mongo/SSPL or
| ElasticSearch thread on this site and you'll see)
|
| While there is definitely discussion of this, you are
| entirely right, there's a substantial proportion of
| people (I'm not claiming that it's necessarily the
| majority or anything - but influential enough to derail
| or block things) who do not take the spirit of the Free
| Software movement into account at all. At a glance, many
| arguments against these licenses don't come from a
| viewpoint that these licenses violate the spirit of Free
| Software - they just mechanically quote the OSI freedoms
| without any critical evaluation or moral reasoning.
|
| pxc's analysis is great and morally I definitely agree
| with it. I don't think that most people agree with it
| though - which legitimises the VSCode "open-source"
| approach.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| The editor is open-source. If you want DRM trap to be open-
| source, create them yourself. VSCode is a text editor at its
| core, and you're free to use it as you see fit.
|
| The blog read like the author is crying that Microsoft is not
| giving away extension for Gitpod to make money
| kuschku wrote:
| This behaviour has a specific name.
|
| Microsoft is embracing open source, gaining market share with
| proprietary extensions, and then those to extinguish any
| truly OSS forks.
|
| Embrace, extend, extinguish. Once again.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| That's not how that term ever worked, but go off.
| bogantech wrote:
| It's a bit of a reach to invoke EEE for a piece of software
| they wrote in the first place.
|
| Of course it's a post relating to MS so there will be at
| least one such comment
| kuschku wrote:
| Back during the early 2000s, when OpenOffice threatened
| to eat Microsoft's lunch, they created the new
| .docx/.pptx/.xlsx Office Open XML file formats and got
| ISO to standardize them as ISO 29500-1.
|
| The standard isn't detailed enough to create your own
| Office implementation. Not even Microsoft Office
| implements it correctly. Microsoft only created the
| standard so they could claim they were as open as
| OpenOffice, to prevent OpenOffice from becoming the
| standard, to make sure third parties would continue
| building upon Microsoft Office, and to ensure third party
| implementations would always be slightly worse.
|
| As leaked emails later showed, even Microsoft employees
| used the Embrace Extend Extinguish term to describe this
| project.
|
| I'm not sure why you think the VSCode situation is so
| different.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| > As leaked emails later showed, even Microsoft employees
| used the Embrace Extend Extinguish term to describe this
| project.
|
| Source?
| bogantech wrote:
| > I'm not sure why you think the VSCode situation is so
| different.
|
| I'm not sure how they're related? How is something MS
| allegedly did with Office over 20 years ago related at
| all?
|
| It's not like they can make plaintext source files
| incompatible with other IDEs
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'm using vs codium. What most useful things am I missing? I
| have not found anything missing. Now I'm really curious.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| "Remote SSH" and "Dev Containers".
|
| https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh
|
| https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers
| staunton wrote:
| Remote ssh works on vs-codium. (With a slightly different
| extension).
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| I thought the server part of VS Code (to be exact a
| proprietary Node addon) is the problem?
|
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/1229#issuecom
| men...
|
| Stupid me, the solution is one post below :D
|
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/1229#issuecom
| men...
| fransje26 wrote:
| Would you mind sharing which extension works for you, to
| help consider a switch to vs-codium?
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| I guess that's https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-
| oss
| fransje26 wrote:
| I'll take a look at it, thank you for the suggestion.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| Same, I wonder if the people complaining have experience with
| vscodium (to know the difference). Everything I want works
| with vscodium and I never had any problems with it. The only
| thing I know doesn't work are dev containers, but I never
| personally wanted to use them.
|
| "most useful things around it are full of DRM and legal
| traps" is a HUGE overstatement. Vscodium is great and have
| everything anyone can want (except, maybe, devcontainers)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's not really DRM. You can make most extensions work on
| codium by changing a few settings. It's just not officially
| supported.
|
| I hate the way they don't open source the useful ones like the
| ssh debugging though
| Pannoniae wrote:
| They have integrity checks and obfuscated code. That's not
| just changing a few settings. See the issue I linked about
| Pylance, for example...
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> It 's just not officially supported._
|
| Isn't it worse than that? They're not just unsupported, I
| thought it was against their EULA to use the MS extensions
| with anything but the official VSCode.
|
| It doesn't matter to the average person using it for personal
| projects but it's a liability to businesses. It wouldn't
| matter most of the time but this is Microsoft we're talking
| about.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Meh, for me personally I don't care about EULAs, as you
| say.
|
| And for business, they will use the official VS Code
| anyway. My own employer is up to their armpits in Satya's
| ass. Over the last 8 years the MS sales goons have managed
| to get us to throw out every third party solution they had
| an option for. We even have to use Edge now.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > And for business, they will use the official VS Code
| anyway.
|
| Our company only has VSCodium in their repos.
| slimsag wrote:
| Its close in spirit to DRM: they enforce that if you are
| using their projects, it is under their legal terms.
|
| Many of their VS Code extensions[0] have license terms which
| /prohibit/ them from being used in editors that are not
| Microsoft's VS Code editor, and Microsoft can issue cease-
| and-desist for violations of this, as well as 'open source
| forks of VS Code' using their marketplace services.
|
| Microsoft also has a pattern they follow where they publish
| repositories on GitHub to proclaim they are open source,
| while actually distributing proprietary binary blobs in them
| that are fundamental core parts of functionality to the
| codebase[2][3][4]
|
| [0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-
| cpptools/issues/6388#iss...
|
| [1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/5784
|
| [2] https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/issues/766
|
| [3] https://devlog.hexops.com/2024/building-the-directx-
| shader-c...
|
| [4] https://github.com/microsoft/Azure-Kinect-Sensor-
| SDK/issues/...
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It's really important to realize that some 70% of the OSI's
| funding comes from proprietary services houses (Amazon,
| Microsoft, and Google mostly and then like... Comcast and IBM),
| and so nobody at the OSI legitimately cares about openness. The
| reason SSPL is not OSI approved is because Amazon pays an
| entire OSI staff salary a year and the SSPL costs Amazon money.
| rectang wrote:
| > _The reason SSPL is not OSI approved is because Amazon pays
| an entire OSI staff salary a year and the SSPL costs Amazon
| money._
|
| This is slanderous nonsense. SSPL is not OSI-approved because
| field-of-use restrictions are not compatible with the Open
| Source Definition, clause 6.
|
| https://opensource.org/osd#fields-of-endeavor
|
| > _6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor_
|
| > _The license must not restrict anyone from making use of
| the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it
| may not restrict the program from being used in a business,
| or from being used for genetic research._
|
| Here's the decision:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230411163802/https://lists.ope.
| ..
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I've read the arguments, but those arguments apply equally
| to the AGPL, which would not be approved by the OSI today.
| SSPL has no field of use restrictions, it simply has
| restrictions that require viral open sourcing.
|
| And there's nothing slanderous about pointing out that,
| yeah, Amazon pays out a significant portion of the OSI's
| entire operating budget. (edit: Actually FWIW, Amazon is
| apparently not currently on the Sponsors page... maybe they
| didn't renew this year. But they used to be at the top.)
| poincaredisk wrote:
| >I've read the arguments, but those arguments apply
| equally to the AGPL
|
| How? You can use AGPL code to develop nuclear weapons and
| murder drones, as long as you publish the code.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| You can also use SSPL code to develop nuclear weapons and
| murder drones, as long as you publish the code!
| Additionally, you can also use SSPL code in a business
| offering that code as a service... as long as you publish
| all of the code for that service!
| poincaredisk wrote:
| Oh. I've read more about SSPL and I actually like it. I
| don't see how it's not open source. I guess OSI, Red Hat
| and Debian know better than me, I'll have to check their
| reasoning. Though you are right that I don't see how it's
| fundamentally different from AGPL.
|
| Thanks for correcting me!
|
| >Specifically, this is discriminatory against users of
| the software that use proprietary software within their
| stack,
|
| (From wikipedia) That's... the point.
| rectang wrote:
| The difference between the AGPL and the SSPL is that
| while both relate to software which the end user
| interacts with over a network, the AGPL places no
| restrictions on what the software is used for, while the
| SSPL encumbers commercial SAAS.
|
| This is a field of use restriction, and it is indeed the
| point of the SSPL! But field of use restrictions are
| disallowed under OSI's Open Source Definition -- because
| it's critically important that Open Source software must
| be usable _for any purpose_ to avoid uncertainty and
| exclusion, as explained elsethread [1].
|
| [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41691577#41694133
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| You can't just keep claiming there's a field of use
| restriction when there isn't. It merely conveys a
| requirement for open sourcing dependencies required for
| operating services, an entirely noble copyleft behavior.
|
| Any business which isn't exploiting open source in order
| to benefit proprietary source won't even be phased by
| this. It's simply a requirement to open source your
| stuff, which the OSI would support if supporting open
| source was actually their mission.
| rectang wrote:
| OK, I believe I understand the distinction you're making
| here.
|
| I had to fight my way through your aspersions about the
| motivations of the people who take part in OSI license
| discussions, some of whom I am personally acquainted
| with. I consider the notion that they are driven by
| allegiance to Amazon and the like risible, although you
| don't have to take my word for it (and shouldn't, it's an
| argument from [negligible] authority).
|
| The idea is that a "field-of-use restriction" should deny
| a license grant based on field-of-use, as opposed to
| granting a right to users to obtain source code based on
| field-of-use. This seems like a technicality when the
| obvious effect is to cripple commercial competition which
| some see as illegitimate and advantage certain other
| parties -- something completely at odds with the idea
| that Open Source software needs to be available for _any_
| use, deeply cherished by myself and many other FOSS
| advocates.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| For what it's worth, while I generally support, develop,
| and use open source software, I think "freedom 0" is
| somewhat problematic. Beyond the fact that I feel us
| doing labor to support the common good should not
| inherently require it be usable for corporate greed (I
| think a noncommercial license shouldn't be treated as a
| sin by the open source crowd), I think there's a sort of
| Paradox of Tolerance issue if you allow proprietary
| developers to compete directly with open source
| developers using their own code.
|
| If we aren't able to say "hey, this is for open source
| use only", companies unburdened by ethics will _always_
| have a market advantage over ethical open source
| companies, and that in the long term will ensure open
| source doesn 't win.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| ladies and gentlemen, this is a perfect example of the
| word-by-word interpretation I was talking about in another
| subthread:) The SSPL is a perfectly sensible license, the
| only thing it does wrong is to stop SaaS exploitation of
| software. As the GP said, the OSI is mostly funded by
| hyperscalers, it's in their vested interests to keep the
| status quo.
|
| Field-of-use restrictions are certainly a useful tool in
| fighting open source exploitation, and the blanket
| disallowal of them just plays into the hands of Amazon and
| whatnot, allowing them to massively profit off everyone
| else's work.
|
| Also, note that the OSI doesn't even follow their own
| definition by the letter! I quote, Section
| 13 is very obviously intended to be a restriction against
| the field of endeavor of offering the software as a
| service, and thus not in compliance with OSD #6. I don't
| see how you can change this while maintaining the intent of
| your license, which is indeed to specifically encumber
| vendors other than MongoDB who engage in that field of
| endeavor.
|
| So they are basically arguing that a restriction in the
| license is _intended_ to stop hyperscalers, not that it
| actually restricts the usage of software in any field! The
| conflict of interest is blatantly obvious here...
| rectang wrote:
| > _So they are basically arguing that a restriction in
| the license is intended to stop hyperscalers, not that it
| actually restricts the usage of software in any field!_
|
| Stopping hyperscalers _is_ restricting usage in a field.
|
| The primary reason that field-of-use restrictions are
| part of the OSD is to avoid excluding _anyone_ from the
| community, and also to avoid fights about whether anyone
| belongs. Historically, military uses were often excluded
| in certain licenses -- but just _what_ constituted
| military use could be very hard to determine and
| potentially could result in endless litigation. Dual-use
| technology, anyone?
|
| The same reasoning applies to hyperscaling. If you allow
| _any_ restrictions on field of use in "Open Source",
| then a fundamental guarantee that countless users of OSS
| have been counting on goes up in smoke. Before, it was
| software that anyone could use for any purpose. But now,
| everyone has to wonder, "am I actually allowed to use
| this Open Source Software"?
|
| I firmly agree with these arguments, and I'm glad that
| the OSI continues to be intellectually and morally
| consistent in applying them -- despite your asserting
| that they must be corrupt to do so.
| xigoi wrote:
| Wouldn't the GPL also violate this clause because you're
| not allowed to use a GPL-licensed program for developing
| proprietary software?
| froh wrote:
| the gcc very clearly states it can be used to create
| proprietary software. always has.
|
| the same goes for anything LGPL licensed, but I'd be
| surprised if you count that as GPL ;-)
| bsder wrote:
| > The short summary is that MS uses multiple, constantly
| changing methods of DRM to make it impossible for people to
| patch out the "only official VSCode" check from the Pylance
| extension. This is very clearly malicious.
|
| Huh? There's been _lots_ of outrage about this. Repeatedly.
|
| However, the problem is that nobody with any resource is
| willing to step up and replace the Microsoft closed source
| plugins. And developers aren't willing to put themselves out to
| use non-encumbered extensions.
|
| It's basically a big "Put Up or Shut Up" from Microsoft, and
| nobody is willing to "put up" so we wind up with "shut up".
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > If you enjoy a rabbithole, look at how much DRM there is in
| Pylance
|
| So just don't use it? The linked discussion points to
| Basedpyright https://github.com/detachhead/basedpyright/ as the
| best free alternative right now (with some additional features
| around Python optional typechecking that aren't even in Pylance
| itself).
| wiseowise wrote:
| Does this fix Jupyter too? As far as I know VSCodium Jupyter
| is broken, unless you use Pylance.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| What are the benefits of running Jupyter from VS Code
| rather than on its own? Isn't Jupyter the sort of thing
| that can only be made more fragile and complicated by IDE
| integration?
| wiseowise wrote:
| Sane editing experience to start with. And proper
| intellisense, etc.
| morgante wrote:
| "Source-available but not strictly OSS" is, in most cases, not
| really giving anything of value to the community. You are _not_
| free to use it in building your own solutions. At best, it
| allows easier collaboration with customers.
|
| Open core absolutely _is_ open source. There 's a clear and
| valuable open source core that others can build on to build
| their own products.
|
| This isn't just hypothetical. As far as I know, no source-
| available license allows you to actually use it to build your
| own product. While VS Code has many other products built on the
| core (including products that lawyers have reviewed closely for
| compliance).
| re-thc wrote:
| > You are not free to use it in building your own solutions
|
| Tell that to the LLMs.
| notpushkin wrote:
| With licenses like Elastic I agree 100%, but what about
| delayed licenses like BUSL or FSL?
| bonzini wrote:
| There are several complications; see here:
| https://lwn.net/Articles/984249/.
|
| For example, if the copyright holder applies a security fix
| to an old version that had "expired" and is now open
| source, will that cause old version to revert to source-
| available? Does any security fix, even the simplest one,
| require clean room reverse engineering on part of the
| community? Unless these questions are answered clearly by
| the copyright holder, BUSL/FSL are not really usable as
| open source even after the expiration date.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > For example, if the copyright holder applies a security
| fix to an old version that had "expired" and is now open
| source, will that cause old version to revert to source-
| available?
|
| Yeah, it's tricky. By default, I think it does go back to
| source-available, but I would trust the vendor to
| explicitly release the fix as open source instead. Of
| course, it should be addressed in future versions of such
| licenses, and in the meanwhile vendors should promise to
| not hold security updates out.
|
| It's not something exclusive to delayed licenses though:
| vendor of a permissively licensed software can make a
| security fix under a proprietary license. They don't do
| this because it would be a dick move and the community
| will fork the software, but this is a possibility.
| immibis wrote:
| Never "trust" a vendor to do something in your best
| interest for free. That's like trusting your landlord not
| to raise your rent.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > Open core absolutely is open source. There's a clear and
| valuable open source core that others can build on to build
| their own products.
|
| Depending on where the line is drawn. How functional the
| "core" in a real life scenario is. Often companies use some
| "enterprise security" features as closed thing, like
| saml/oauth/... where one could argue those should be default
| state of things these days.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| vscode is seemingly on the right side of the line,
| considering all the places where monaco and oss vscode has
| been used.
| xigoi wrote:
| A program that allows me to freely use and modify it as long
| as I'm not a multi-billion-dollar corporation is much more
| useful to me than a program which allows anyone to use and
| modify a part of it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > If you enjoy a rabbithole, look at how much DRM there is in
| Pylance (another extension that MS has locked down):
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/discussions/1641
|
| The funny thing is that I'll never understand _why_ it's not
| open source and _why_ its license prohibits its use in
| VSCodium. Pylance is good, but not _that_ good. Certainly not
| on a level of PyCharm. What incentive do they have to keep it
| secret except being evil?
| poincaredisk wrote:
| >What incentive do they have to keep it secret except being
| evil?
|
| Money. Which is OK. Developers need salaries. They need to
| justify the department budget to bean counters and sales
| internally. The company you work for is most likely not a
| charity too.
|
| If you want to strictly use free software (as I do), VsCodium
| is great for everything I need.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Ok, I'll rephrase: how do they make money with Pylance?
| poincaredisk wrote:
| They make money with VsCode (by forced, or at least hard
| to disable, telemetry, ads [1], and probably many other
| subtle things. Plenty of ways to monetize developer
| eyeballs). Pylance is just a vehicle to encourage people
| to use proprietary VsCode instead of open forks like
| VsCodium.
|
| [1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/60989
| lozenge wrote:
| You can't use Gitpod, Theia IDE, etc with Pylance. Or
| GitHub Copilot. Or Live Share or numerous other VSCode
| extensions.
|
| The idea is people start a project in VS Code, need to
| scale up to a reproducible dev environment for multiple
| users, and follow ads in VSCode to GitHub Codespaces,
| which charges by the hour for VMs. Now you're locked into
| that, you're locked into GitHub as well, and they can
| cross sell you GitHub Actions, GitHub Advanced Security
| &etc.
|
| Therefore, Pyright is almost the minimum needed to add
| type checking to your CI process.
|
| Edit: to clarify, not only is Codespaces advertised in VS
| Code, it also uses private APIs so no competitor can
| publish an extension which replicates this functionality
| on the VSCode marketplace.
| exceptione wrote:
| Like I wrote here [0], corporate has an azure
| subscription. All the companies code repositories already
| live there, including build automation. A capable
| vscodium isn't going to eat into Azure baseline.
|
| I don't think MS is after solo hobby devs. For startups
| they have other incentives to lure them into their
| ecosystem, like free Azure credits.
|
| And that is why open source projects on github are free
| too. Because the paying organizations depend on the free
| software ecosystem, build by volunteers in their free
| time. MS wants control [1] about that nonetheless,
| because not having that is a risk to their baseline
|
| ____
|
| 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695356
|
| 1. That is not necessarily harming libre software per se,
| but keep in mind that MS is only interested into OSS as
| long as their commercial customers depend on it.
| maxloh wrote:
| > The funny thing is that I'll never understand _why_ it's
| not open source and _why_ its license prohibits its use in
| VSCodium.
|
| And also the fact that Pyright, the underlying library that
| powers Pylance, is open source. Microsoft even has a mostly
| workable demo extension built from it, which is fully open
| source, published in their marketplace, and receives regular
| updates.
| devjab wrote:
| VSCode is build to sell Azure and other Microsoft services,
| which they won't if you use VSCodium. To a lot of people this
| will probably be less obvious than it is to anyone working in
| a Microsoft heavy enterprise organisation. The VSCode
| extensions integrate incredibly well with the Microsoft
| infrastructure you already have when you're tied into Azure
| and the Microsoft AI services. It also ties in rather well
| with both Azure DevOps and GitHub, which are other services
| you're then likely to purchase.
|
| I don't mean this as a negative thing as such. It's just
| Microsoft being better at selling products to enterprise
| organisations than anyone else. One of the reasons Azure has
| grown from around 10% to 25% of the global market share
| during the previous past 5-10 years while AWS has actually
| lost its position is simply sales. When AWS first entered
| Europe they were a lot like Google Cloud, in that even if you
| were a municipality you would end up in an automated support
| loop. Then Azure came along and sold the same Microsoft
| support as they've always done, which is basically the best
| IT business partner you can have as an enterprise
| organisation, and naturally they won. It's not like Amazon
| didn't notice, a few months after Azure really rolled out we
| suddenly had an AWS account manager and direct phone support.
| But by then the ship had sort of sailed because of how
| Microsoft simply offers great value. Teams is another good
| example, it was a worse communications platform than what we
| had at the time, but it was "free" because it was attached to
| every user license we had, including the cheap educational
| ones. Almost nobody in non-tech enterprise will spend money
| on something they get for free, even if the free product
| takes years to become as good.
|
| VSCode is the same. We pay for co-pilot and we pay for a lot
| of the Azure integrations, because why wouldn't we? In the
| giant IT budget heading to Microsoft they are tiny costs
| which are in the "services" category in the excel sheet that
| heads for the budget. It is tiny, but when you consider just
| how many EU enterprise organisations buy these services it'll
| amount to millions and for some services billions of revenue
| for Microsoft.
|
| A good way to think of the "new" Microsoft strategy is
| similar to how cartoons are used to sell toys. You can watch
| Lego Dreamzzz for free on YouTube because Lego knows it means
| a lot of people are going to buy their Dreamzzz sets. It's
| the same thing with VSCode. On top of that, they're winning
| the familiarity game. When you hire a new developer, they'll
| want to use what they know, which for many people is VSCode.
| exceptione wrote:
| Agree with your post, but this gist still doesn't make much
| sense to me:
|
| > VSCode is build to sell Azure and other Microsoft
| services, which they won't if you use VSCodium
|
| If corporate has bought into MS, they will use Azure
| services anyway. So for MS it would not matter if vscodium
| also integrates well with Azure or has a good .net core
| debugger, their customers will still bring the whole IT
| budget to them.
|
| Because you are spot on. Corporate buys the whole MS store,
| only walk the road that MS marketing has blessed and it
| happily walks into the Azure trap. They outsource IT
| strategy and planning to MS anyway, and MS names it
| "Azure".
| poincaredisk wrote:
| >The short summary is that MS uses multiple, constantly
| changing methods of DRM to make it impossible for people to
| patch out the "only official VSCode" check from the Pylance
| extension. This is very clearly malicious.
|
| Huh? If anything, MS prevents people from shooting themselves
| in the foot and illegally installing a piece of software
| against the license terms.
|
| You can use vscodium for free, it's great, you literally don't
| have access to a few MS extensions (with open alternatives,
| which you can support financially if you care).
| Karellen wrote:
| > MS has managed to pacify even the strongest FOSS advocates
|
| I'm not sure that's the case. I think the strongest FOSS
| advocates gave up on Microsoft _decades_ ago, and just don 't
| engage with anything they put out. If MS release source-
| available stuff, strong FOSS advocates don't peep because
| they've not even looked at it. Why bother - it's Microsoft. If
| someone else does it, well, the FOSS advocates still had some
| hope that what they didn't wouldn't be terrible, so there's
| space for those hopes to be dashed.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Yeah, I think this is the problem that this (people) are,
| expecting another corporate entity to do the same thing is
| actually hilarious.
|
| hey, we welcome microsoft to countribute to FOSS, but
| expecting to behave like another is laughable given the
| alternative
| fabioz wrote:
| Yes, PyLance has a pretty strict license and makes it very
| clear it cannot be used in forks (and that's not really
| surprising and pretty standard I'd even say for a corporation
| such as Microsoft, it's like the current licenses saying this
| is open source but cannot be used by competitors, what's really
| surprising for me is that forks are choosing to ignore this):
|
| > INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. a) General. You may install and
| use any number of copies of the software only with Microsoft
| Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Azure
| DevOps, Team Foundation Server, and successor Microsoft
| products and services (collectively, the "Visual Studio
| Products and Services") to develop and test your applications.
| b) Third Party Components. The software may include third party
| components with separate legal notices or governed by other
| agreements, as may be described in the ThirdPartyNotices
| file(s) accompanying the software.
|
| One thing I don't understand is how forks (I'm actually talking
| about Cursor which is one I'm actually evaluatinng) are getting
| away with scrapping all extensions from the VSCode
| marketplace... I even e-mailed them but had no official
| position on that. Maybe they have some separate contract with
| Microsoft -- they do have OpenAI backing, so, maybe they have
| some bridge there, does anyone know? Or maybe Microsoft is just
| waiting to see how they themselves can profit for it and so is
| taking no legal action at this point?
|
| -- disclaimer: I'm on the author of PyDev and I do have my own
| Python extension that I publish to VSCode and OpenVSX (https://
| marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fabioz.v...)...
| it's completely Open Source in Eclipse, but for VSCode it's
| currently commercial. I discovered that's a nice way to have
| less people requesting support, even though 99% of it is still
| Open Source ;)
| troupo wrote:
| > People when a piece of software is source-available but not
| strictly OSS: outrage
|
| There's no longer outrage, since this has become the norm.
| Biggest most obvious example: Chrome.
| exceptione wrote:
| MS is a bit weird. After realizing that most competent
| developers had left the MS ecosystem, they went for a
| _Zeitenwende_. But they did only for 90%.
|
| I wonder to what extent this halfheartedness should be ascribed
| to the MS org chart or to reasoning like "we should prevent a
| competent competitor to run away with our tools".
|
| In the mean time, there is a capable replacement named Theia
| [0] with none of the strings attached. We as a whole would do
| best to move to that one. [1]
|
| ___
|
| 0. https://theia-ide.org/#theiaide
|
| 1. That is to say: for vscode kind of experience. Native IDE's
| are unbeatable imho.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| To be honest, Theia (the last beta I tried some months ago)
| is everything people always complain about Electron apps:
| slow as molasses - way worse than e.g. Atom (or Pulse) (which
| VS Code actually isn't).
| wvh wrote:
| Convenience and comfort are freedom's enemy. What is going
| wrong with the traditional editors and programming tools that
| (assumably) younger devs are going for those full-blown IDEs?
| Has the complexity of development with back/front/ops exploded
| so much that older editors are lagging behind modern needs?
|
| As OSS old-timer, I gave VS Code a try, but it was too noisy
| and distracting, slow, and didn't allow enough control over
| what was being installed and when. To each their own of course,
| but I didn't see any particular reason why VS Code is much
| better or deserves to be more popular than other editors, and
| if any functionality is missing from other editors - especially
| those that are incorporating tree-sitter - then maybe we can
| just improve those alternatives?
|
| Talking about modern editors, I like where Zed is headed, but
| that project also has some non-OSS components or aspirations if
| I remember right.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| > The future of software development tooling that is being built
| is closed as fuck, and people seem to be okay with it because
| select components meet the OSI definition while missing the
| bigger picture.
|
| This is such a huge problem and something that I have regularly
| commented on on Hacker News itself how the open source term is
| being applied so loosely especially by a bunch of VC funded
| companies who are further perpetrating this horrible horrible
| change in language and meaning and the ethos behind the open
| source movement.
|
| YC itself is funding a bunch of these companies who claim to be
| open source but do not follow the ethos at all.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The problem is not companies doing this but users and
| developers not caring or sharing your concerns. All this
| moralism about ethos and such is just not that relevant.
|
| What matters is that software licenses are legal text
| documents. The only place where the interpretation of those
| texts matters is in a court room. I don't think there are a lot
| of court cases involving VS Code. MS tends to have their house
| in order on that front.
|
| So, VS Code seems safe enough in the legal sense. Yes, it has
| some extensions that are not licensed as OSS or that are simply
| closed source. So what? If that bothers you, don't use those.
| Or better, fix it by creating some open source. Open source is
| not a right, it's a privilege that is granted to you at the
| discretion of the creators of that software. Not something that
| you can demand from them.
|
| VS Code is a closed source product that includes lots of OSS
| components. So much that there's VS Codium a well, which is
| fully OSS. A lot of those OSS components are used in other
| products as well. And some of those things are fully open
| source. The value of the VS code ecosystem is that it enables
| this ecosystem of components and products to thrive.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Coding in notepad or nano has been a great investment of my time.
|
| I don't need to learn any of these tools or read about any drama,
| I just type letters into the screen and use my keyboard to move
| my pointer. That's it, if I need anything more complex to handle
| my codestring, I write code.
|
| But I have never needed to run a search and replace of a
| variable, both notepad and nano can do that. If I need anything
| more complex I do it manually. Anyone that does some exercise or
| has had a physical job knows that doing something 26 times in a
| row is basic stuff of any worthwile endeavor.
| JoeOfTexas wrote:
| That just sounds painful if you work on large projects.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Then again, maybe large projects are a bad idea.
| broodbucket wrote:
| They tend to have this nasty habit of running the entire
| world, though.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Rarely, it's mostly small projects, but many many many of
| them.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Proudly written on a device run by a huge collection of
| huge projects
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Yeah, early in my career I got by with gedit on Ubuntu but
| before too long a 700,000+ line PHP project with deep, deep
| inheritance trees showed up and I very much embraced an IDE.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Would running a command line debugger be too different from
| your approach.
|
| I would consider bothering with some static analysis tool,
| but definitely not with php or other runtime heavy
| languages.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| the only time i would ever consider doing that is when building
| a hello world application
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Maybe also set your font to bright green Comic Sans while
| you're at it..?
| bobim wrote:
| Use scite please, it's a match with your brutalist approach to
| development, but with some goodies. You won't regret.
| TZubiri wrote:
| And corrupt the purity of my no-dependency development
| environment? No way.
|
| This approach extends to the application environment as well,
| download nothing, use Operating System tools, code the rest.
|
| Download nothing. Upload only.
| bobim wrote:
| It's not a download, it's a blessing. It's not corrupting,
| it's purifying. It's syntax highlighting for your strained
| eyes and block commenting for your sore fingers. It's
| peace. Take care.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| I love your extreme position. I don't believe it could work for
| any of the projects I work on, and even if it would it would be
| a huge time sink and it would hold me back a lot.
|
| But I dream about a simpler world where I could just open nano
| on a dusted terminal in a basement, grab my printed copy of a
| OS manual, and code away.
| offices wrote:
| >Anyone that ... has had a physical job knows that doing
| something 26 times in a row is basic stuff of any worthwile
| endeavor.
|
| I have. There were an awful lot of electric tools doing things
| that used to require manual work. And they were used even the
| old guys who were fighting against their broken bodies to work
| for long enough be able to retire.
| mustache_kimono wrote:
| I'm still trying to figure out what the issue is.
|
| It _sounds like_ MS is making a better cpptools /C++ extension
| mouse trap and it's impossible to build a fully OSS version
| because many of the MS components are closed? And when a user
| discovers he/she can't use their native extensions from any web
| interface, this is a problem for the web interface guys? I have
| to ask -- if people want to use this freeware instead of OSS
| software, it might be disappointing, but is that really a
| problem?
|
| If there is an answer, it would seem to be more information about
| who is to blame. Perhaps open source vendors should be more clear
| that their offerings are also open source _and_ open ecosystem?
| Perhaps that would tip off devs that not every extension is, that
| is -- the MS alternative extension is not.
|
| One could even be more forceful: "Certain
| alternatives, like vscode-cpptools, are NOT licensed under an OSI
| approved license. vscode-cpptools contains many unexamined
| binary blob components. Developers of blah blah blah C++
| extension strongly believe in an open ecosystem for VSCode
| extensions, but MS has also refused to allow redistribution of
| vscode-cpptools, if used by native open source builds or by those
| offering VSCode via web services. Developers of blah blah blah
| believe, whether the code is closed or open source, ALL VSCode
| extensions should be freely redistributable for the good of the
| broader VSCode extension ecosystem."
|
| If major extension projects are aligned, they could simply add a
| notice like above to their description on their marketplace page?
| Trust me, legally, culturally, MS really, really doesn't want to
| deny access to its marketplace, because a few OSS projects wanted
| to offer a comparison of their license terms to those of MS.
|
| Apple is currently dealing with a marketplace lawsuit. MS doesn't
| want a marketplace or another antitrust suit.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| Here's a simple example: you write an API consisting of one
| public function. You compile the API into a binary with a
| closed source license.
|
| You then create another API with one public function. This
| function is an extern call into the library binary.
|
| You publish the second API into Github with an MIT license and
| proclaim your API is open-source.
|
| The broad theme is: if 100% of the functionality of the
| software is inside a closed-source compiled binary, should it
| be false advertisement to say it is "open source." Or in other
| words, who draws the line when someone oversteps the intent of
| "open-source" for exploitative reasons.
|
| I don't know if cpptools' functionality is 100% closed; in
| reality there are three other licenses you must agree-to within
| a repository that is supposedly MIT licensed.
| mustache_kimono wrote:
| > The broad theme is: if 100% of the functionality of the
| software is inside a closed-source compiled binary, should it
| be false advertisement to say it is "open source."
|
| I get it. I disagree that it's false advertising, though I do
| agree _it could be scummy_. For instance, if MS created a
| combination package, licensed that package as MIT, whereas
| the important bits were proprietary.
|
| Maybe any conflation of licenses have since been scrubbed
| from the marketplace, but from what I see on their license
| pages right now, I'm not sure MS's behavior rises to scummy.
| The Python package makes pretty clear it includes pylance,
| and pylance makes clear it's not MIT licensed.
|
| > I don't know if cpptools' functionality is 100% closed; in
| reality there are three other licenses you must agree-to
| within a repository that is supposedly MIT licensed.
|
| It should be well known by now vscode-cpptools and vscode-
| python are partially closed, which is good enough as closed,
| which is good enough as BSL, etc. If it's not clear, then
| that's a failure of the open source community and
| alternatives to make it clear. The license links seem pretty
| clear to me. Perhaps it would be better if the situation were
| made even clearer, like a badge for OSI licensed packages,
| but it's not yours or my store.
|
| My God's honest feeling is transparency and building better
| stuff is really the only remedy. You either believe in the
| FOSS development model or you don't. You either have a strong
| open source language community or you don't. If the C++ or
| Python OSS people can't muster an alternative, it's not MS's
| fault for building a better mouse trap which only works with
| MS products.
|
| There is this overwhelming desire in FOSS communities to
| works the refs, or even FUD wrong-thinking projects, instead
| of saying: "They have a development model and so do we. We
| believe ours is better." Python, in particular, has so much
| interesting language server stuff going on in Rust (see Ruff
| and pylyzer). Re: C++, clangd is apparently very good too. It
| stinks for the ecosystem that MS has acted this way, but I
| think one just needs to very clear about whose fault it is
| when something breaks, or when someone can't use an MS
| extension, because it's obviously MS's fault.
| btown wrote:
| The headline of this is a bit counterintuitive: many people, when
| they see the word "fracture," might imagine an ecosystem in which
| different offerings can coexist. Someone not reading the full
| article might even think this implies that VS Code might even
| "break apart" into many open-source forks, which would be a good
| thing.
|
| But the word "fracture" is very much meant in a different context
| here, in that Microsoft does not allow its proprietary extensions
| to VS Code to be used legally by any third-party fork, and thus
| can leverage the unique and unstandardized behavior of e.g. its
| closed-source Pylance Python language server to ensure that no
| fork can replicate the experience (glitches-as-features and all)
| that practically all users of VS Code will expect, thus giving
| forks a Sisyphean challenge to overcome.
|
| https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/11/05/vscode-...
| is linked in the OP and discusses the surprise the community felt
| when VS Code transitioned to Pylance. I'd venture to say that
| most users of VS Code have no idea how much of their Python
| editing experience is run by closed-source logic.
|
| On one hand, it's a bit frustrating that many people, myself
| included, switched to VS Code from other IDEs because "if the
| community sees a problem, the community has the tools to fix it
| and will do so." But that ceases to be true when the bulk of the
| IDE's power comes from closed-source language servers that
| Microsoft could feature-freeze (or deallocate resources from
| them) at any time, and still have ~years before any community
| language server could begin to replicate all the edge-case
| behaviors of their closed-source extensions and gain notoriety as
| a better alternative to Microsoft's defaults.
|
| Is this a bad status quo, though? Microsoft's invested incredible
| resources in a stellar user experience to date, and might not
| have done so if it didn't have this strategy in play - a strategy
| that ensures that no fork will ever be able to capture developer
| mindshare, and that ensures that the larger Microsoft ecosystem
| of services will never be disadvantaged or de-promoted by such a
| fork. As long as leadership desires to continue making this
| advantage larger and larger, and have Microsoft developers
| dogfood their own IDE, and thus continue to invest in their
| language servers, most users will benefit. And sure, some of us
| will need to keep typing "# type: ignore" into our codebases to
| work around a Pylance bug that nobody can see the code to submit
| a PR to fix... but we gain so much in return for that
| inflexibility. I'm more interested in how my IDE helps me to make
| my own visions into reality, than in the purity of whether it can
| truly be called "open source."
| dualogy wrote:
| > the bulk of the IDE's power comes from closed-source language
| servers
|
| Not sure that's so very true for most langs / stacks other than
| Python. Go LSP & vscode extension is Go-owned, C++ you have
| clang LSP+ext and can really skip MS' offering(s) there.
| TypeScript LSP+ext is most likely OSS (dunno) or else MS-owned
| anyway; dotnet same. Niche langs own their LSP+exts anyway. The
| builtin HTML / CSS stuff is bare-bones IIRC, if there aren't
| richer OSS alternatives out there yet there sooner-or-later
| will be. Python, I wouldn't know, but let's face it, if a lang
| is a big FOSS project it can and will mobilize their own owned
| and ever-more-excellent LSP + ext if and when necessary /
| desirable -- and if it's niche and small-scale, MS won't
| anyway, proprietary or not.
| amluto wrote:
| In some sense, this ought to be an opportunity. VSCode's
| ecosystem is, in many respects, quite weak:
|
| - cpptools is kind of amazing but also pretty bad. It regularly
| malfunctions for me. It's essentially undebuggable. I have less
| experience with the other extensions, but I don't expect that
| they that much better.
|
| - The VSCode security story is very, very weak. Extensions are
| not sandboxed. The client, accessing remote repos, is wildly
| insecure, by design.
|
| And that second point is a big deal. Maybe when poking at your
| own company's code, you aren't that concerned about your repo
| attacking you. You probably should be concerned about malicious
| extensions, but we're all far too used to trusting dev tooling.
| (Don't forget that MS's extensions are just this side of
| malicious.)
|
| But, with AI, you should _absolutely_ not trust your LLM. It is
| _entirely unsafe_ to give an LLM that might try to exploit you
| the ability to write into your repo directly or to run JS code in
| the context of any portion of VSCode. And it's really quite easy
| to convince LLMs to engage in all manner of shenanigans.
|
| There's an opportunity to make a better ecosystem. In a better
| ecosystem, the equivalent of cpptools would not have telemetry,
| because the equivalent of cpptools _would not have Internet
| access_. It would have the ability to read the workspace, to
| create cache files for its own data, and to operate its UI, and
| that's all.
| tjoff wrote:
| The clangd extension is much better for me, assuming that you
| have or are able to generate a compile_commands.json (at least
| easy in cmake) and point clangd to it.
| chpatrick wrote:
| I agree VS Code + clangd is probably the best C++ development
| experience I ever had.
| theptip wrote:
| How does it stack up vs. CLion?
| eulgro wrote:
| It doesn't, CLion is way better.
| tcbawo wrote:
| What does it do better?
| okl wrote:
| One problem I always had with VSCode, is that it seems to
| fill up its autocomplete suggestions with "near-string-
| matches" from files all over the project. The jetbrains
| tools are quite strict in that regard and won't propose
| random string matches that don't fit semantically.
| txdv wrote:
| I recently tried clangd with nvim and it was so good
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| There are generators for the compilation databases that work
| with Makefiles and other build systems, like Bear:
| https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear
| Ragnarork wrote:
| Came here to suggest Bear as well, very handy piece of
| software to generate the compilation database in a mostly
| tool-agnostic way.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| Yes, their C++ LSP isn't really good and I've heard C# isn't
| good either - but that's because they want to sell Visual
| Studio too. But especially "Remote SSH" and "Dev Containers"
| are so called game changers. And their Typescript and Python
| extensions are actually good.
| easton wrote:
| Lately they've begun embedding the same C# analysis stuff
| they have in VS into VSCode if you pay for the license. I
| haven't used it in anger (long since left for Rider), but it
| has come in handy when troubleshooting people's VS issues at
| work from my Mac. The test explorer now blows up in exactly
| the same way in VS and VSCode :)
| neonsunset wrote:
| C# extension works well and uses Roslyn Language Server that
| is part[0] of the Roslyn (C# compiler) itself - this is what
| the base C# extension[1] uses. Both of these are licensed
| under MIT.
|
| The closed-source part is 'vsdbg' which is Visual Studio's
| debugger shipped as a component that the extension uses. It,
| however, can be replaced with Samsung's 'NetCoreDbg' by using
| the extension fork[2].
|
| [0]: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/tree/main/src/LanguageS
| erve...
|
| [1]: https://github.com/dotnet/vscode-csharp
|
| [2]: https://github.com/muhammadsammy/free-vscode-csharp
| (please consider giving it a star, it's the only actively
| maintained alternative and other tools end up relying on it
| downstream to support debugging - VSCodium as well as Emacs
| and Neovim with VSC extension bridges)
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| > The client, accessing remote repos, is wildly insecure, by
| design
|
| Who's the best kid in the block regarding third-party
| extensions security?
|
| There's really not much standing in front of a supply-chain
| attack for my editor of choice, emacs. Most people use a
| community extensions aggregator that also directly fetches from
| git repositories. The only slim advantage we have is that I'm
| sure a much higher % of emacs users would actually look into
| the source code of the extensions they pull.
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| If you want to be cautious, I have somewhat higher confidence
| in the versions of Emacs packages published on the Debian
| repositories[1] than the ones on ELPA/MELPA.
|
| The downside is that not every package is packaged for
| Debian, and the versions are a bit stale.
|
| https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ELPA+&searchon=n.
| ..
| amluto wrote:
| vscode tunnel is already a massive step up from vscode remote
| SSH here.
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| > - The VSCode security story is very, very weak. Extensions
| are not sandboxed. The client, accessing remote repos, is
| wildly insecure, by design.
|
| This is a big concern for our Infosec team. There is no middle
| ground between open access to every Extension on the
| marketplace or locked down and Extensions are installed via
| local files. The latter being a significant overhead in
| maintaining VSCode.
| spacemanspiff01 wrote:
| Can't you host your own extension marketplace?
| doubled112 wrote:
| Then you have other problems. Maintaining the store itself,
| obtaining the extensions people want, and keeping the
| extensions up to date adds some overhead.
|
| Looks like it should be possible, although I have no
| experience doing it myself.
|
| https://github.com/coder/code-marketplace
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Sounds like that's the price your org is willing to pay for
| your its flavor of Infosec.
| EasyMark wrote:
| All these same things are true for emacs/vim/CLion plugins as
| well. You kind of either have to accept the risk cowboy
| style, do something in the middle (maybe only allow very well
| known extensions from source you trust), or live without the
| extensions.
| diggan wrote:
| > Extensions are not sandboxed
|
| This is quite surprising to me if true. Microsoft has for years
| touted "Security is everything and the single most important
| thing right now", yet something that basic is not taken care of
| for the most security minded audience, and for the audience
| with probably the biggest impact in case ssh-keys and alike
| gets stolen?
|
| People randomly installing extensions (and Visual Studio Code
| suggesting random extensions by "language support") starts to
| look a lot worse than I thought. Guess I'm lucky I never jumped
| aboard the Visual Studio Code train...
| Sayrus wrote:
| Extensions often rely on third-party binaries (such as
| Language Servers, kubectl, ssh or even git itself), internet
| access (SAAS providers, pulling data or definitions, ...) and
| on your filesystem (SSH Config, Kubernetes config, Config
| folder in your home, ...). Sandboxing these extensions is not
| easy unless everything is configured within VSCode which is
| rarely the case.
|
| As far as I know, extensions are not sandboxed either on
| Emacs, (Neo)vim, Jetbrains IDEs.
| miohtama wrote:
| Please correct me if I am wrong but the only application
| (class) that currently sandboxes extensions is a web
| browser. So the bar is pretty high.
|
| Sandboxing does not come for a free, as it creates more
| complex development APIs and a performance hits.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| And happily VS Code runs in the browser (vscode.dev,
| github.dev) if you do choose to make that
| security/performance trade off at some point for some
| reason. And with sync you can have all your UI extensions
| and keybindings ported over under the covers.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| Definitely.
|
| Would still be nice to have the option to opt into, for
| example, running as a WASM isolate - given the option of
| a robust sandbox, some plugins will find it desirable to
| migrate and gain the secure badge or however isolated
| plugins are marked for user identification.
|
| But There are plugins where it's going to be too much of
| an uphill battle to move to that model though. I still
| think on balance having sandboxed plugins, however
| they're implemented, would be pretty nice.
| amluto wrote:
| VSCode could shove the entire extension, third party
| binaries included, into a sandbox, Docker-style. And "give
| this extension Internet access" could be an option when you
| install it, with the default being "no", and a bit warning
| if you want to override that default.
|
| For all that the Docker ecosystem is somewhat of a mess, it
| seems more than adequate for this use case.
| diggan wrote:
| > into a sandbox, Docker-style
|
| Nope, docker alone/by itself is not a sandbox, at all.
| Not built for that purpose, nor suitable for that
| purpose.
| iLemming wrote:
| Extensions (in Emacs lingo we call them 'packages') are not
| sandboxed by design. Because unlike VSCode, you are allowed
| to override any, just about any part of a package's code.
| You can, for example, grab a command introduced in a third-
| party or a built-in package and override only specific
| parts of it without having to rewrite the entire thing.
|
| Of course, in many cases that can make your entire setup
| brittle - i.e., what happens when the package author
| decides to change some functionality that you carefully and
| tightly integrated into your system? At the same time,
| there's enormous, unmatched flexibility for making your own
| rules of the game - there's nothing that comes even close.
| You can change a function to do things that it was never
| initially designed for. For example, if there's a command
| that lets you perform GitHub search and open results in the
| browser, you can advise that command to change the behavior
| and instead of opening the results in the browser, send
| that data to an LLM and display it in a text buffer. You
| wouldn't have to rewrite the entire command; you would only
| have to override a specific part of it. In Vim, you'd have
| to rewrite the entire function. In VSCode, you'd likely
| have to make a separate extension. In Emacs, you wouldn't
| even have to save the damn thing into a file - you can
| write it in a scratch buffer and immediately try it out.
| sevensor wrote:
| VSCode also, by design, obscures what's really going on on the
| development environment, so that when I help a VSCode user who
| gets stuck, they often don't know what computer they're logged
| into, where their files actually are in the file system, which
| Python interpreter they're using, what HTTPS_PROXY is set to,
| and so on. The ssh extension also spins up a server process for
| every client a user connects, and it seems a bit inconsistent
| about preserving state across disconnections. All in all, I
| spend a lot of time helping people fix problems they've made
| for themselves by using VSCode.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| What kind of set up do you use? This does not resonate at all
| with my experience of vs code
| zdragnar wrote:
| Presumably, this is talking about some remote devcontainer
| configuration. None of that really applies to using vscode
| locally, at least not any more than any other editor.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| "The free software Microsoft is giving away isn't open enough"
| has to be one of the weirdest modern takes. I remember when "free
| IDE" meant "Eclipse" or "vim with a billion extensions".
|
| From what I can tell, Microsoft isn't even sabotaging open
| alternatives, they're just Not As Good. That sucks, but that's
| just how it works when you're using software made by a company
| that likes to pay its staff and still make a profit.
|
| I welcome everyone who feels entitled to the source code of
| Microsoft's very best software to see what true open source,
| maintained by an independent non-profit organisation looks like.
| You'll get an IDE that's functional, maybe even features a real
| debugger, but you'll probably wish you could go back not long
| after.
|
| People are taking software given to them free of charge for
| granted. It's not that long ago that you had to buy IDEs for
| hundreds or thousands of dollars and you had to buy the upgrade
| if you wanted the next version a couple of years later.
| derkades wrote:
| > From what I can tell, Microsoft isn't even sabotaging open
| alternatives
|
| I think they are. VSIX extensions are supposed to be some sort
| of open standard, but some Microsoft extensions like Pylance
| actively refuse to work if they detect running in something
| other than Microsoft's build of VS Code.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| _Microsoft 's_ extensions don't work, but that's Microsoft's
| choice. Whatever open source alternative for Pylance exists
| (if any) will work just fine.
|
| If they messed with VSCode to sabotage OpenPylance or
| whatever the situation would be different, but in this case
| people are just looking a gift horse in the mouth.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Pylance is Pyright (open source) plus custom Small Language
| Models and other proprietary sauce.
|
| Pylance isn't sabotaging Pyright, because it is built on
| top of it. You can find alternative extensions that are
| "just" Pyright. (They have a fraction of the users because
| the SLM-based magic of Pylance is a nicer experience if you
| can "afford" it [based on your principles].)
|
| Pyright is _maybe_ sabotaging competitive projects MyPy and
| Ruff by being "knighted" as a part of Pylance, but that's
| not generally how open source competition is seen to exist.
| There also doesn't currently seem to be competition _for_
| the proprietary bits of Pylance outside of the LLM space.
| That 's maybe catching up quickly, but Microsoft's more
| dedicated SLM models might still be leaders in the space,
| and Microsoft wanting to keep models proprietary while they
| are competitive shouldn't be a surprise.
| ghuntley wrote:
| Encourage you to look at the bigger picture. What happens
| when there's an official extension by a 3rd party vendor
| SDK that defines a dependency on the proprietary language
| server/extension.
|
| It'll work fine for "Visual Studio Code" but all these
| OSS forks (inc recent venture capital funding for AI
| ones) gets wrecked.
|
| It turns into a game of having to iterate through the
| graph and trying to convince official SDKs to change
| their product direction.
|
| Pushing shit up hill...
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| How is this different from arguing that Linux is not open
| source because Oracle won't run on it without a valid
| license?
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Exactly. Look at the Ashai Linux project. They are doing
| tremendous work, but getting basic feature parity with a now 3
| year old laptop is still ongoing work.
|
| Then once feature parity is done, performance problems are
| next, if they ever get addressed and completed.
|
| I love the idea for open source software, but the very best
| software in todays world is always something you have to pay
| for.
| riiii wrote:
| >"The free software Microsoft is giving away isn't open enough"
|
| This is not a quote from the article and isn't what the article
| is saying. It's effectively suggestig that devs are being duped
| and MS goals are closing essential parts down.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Imagine a hypothetical world in which a nonprofit funded by
| donations and grants from nonprofits and governments funded
| your code editor.
|
| That was eclipse.
|
| There are lots of great examples of well funded open source
| software projects. Companies have a history of killing them
| off, which hurts everyone.
| iLemming wrote:
| So my problem with MSFT's big plan is that I simply don't know
| it.
|
| I do know the price I'm paying for using Emacs and Vim. Even
| though (in theory) they are completely free, in reality there's
| a price there. Vim and Emacs require time, patience, and
| dedication, just like any other tools. I know who gains from my
| choice - myself, the community, and the industry.
|
| I knew exactly how JetBrains profited from my choice of using
| IntelliJ in the past - I paid for the license and renewed it
| every year.
|
| But what's MSFT's scheme here? They're giving me this
| beautiful, nice tool completely for "free"? What price will I
| have to pay for that choice in the future?
|
| I'm sorry, but I think every dev should remain at least a bit
| skeptical, do you truly believe that Microsoft, a colossal
| corporation with a market capitalization comparable to the GDP
| of Germany, spends an enormous amount of resources to build "a
| free" code editor, because... I dunno, they love you or
| something?
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| We are in uncharted territory. This major corporation has a
| "big plan" that relies on making their product offerings
| "open source" while simultaneously surrounding it with a
| minefield such that the "open source" aspect is
| camouflage/subterfuge.
|
| "Subterfuge Source" has a nice ring to it, and abbreviated
| "SS" really drives the point home as well.
| crabbone wrote:
| > Microsoft's very best software
|
| This has to be a joke, right?
|
| Microsoft's software is absolute nightmare pile of trash.
|
| > People are taking software given to them free of charge for
| granted.
|
| Whooosh: this is the point made by the author of the article
| zooming over your head. The point is that closed-source
| software that pretends to be open-source will affect _even
| those who don 't need or want to use it_.
|
| For example, I don't want to use Azure DevOps (Github Actions)
| or w/e it's called. It's absolute garbage. Abysmal design,
| abysmal implementation. But, I'm forced into it because the org
| I work for has an obligation to put their projects in GitHub.
| And, against my will, my work and my knowledge is used by
| Microsoft to abuse their users.
|
| My only consolation is that I do this as a paid job, and I,
| personally, will not use Github, and will advise everyone I can
| to do the same. But this is too little. I want to be a good
| person, and to do my job in such a way that it's valuable to
| people who requested it. I feel really bad that, instead, I'm
| indirectly peddling the pile of garbage made by Microsoft to
| astronomically enrich the few people standing at the top of the
| company.
| dgreensp wrote:
| It takes a LOT of reading to find out what the actual point is
| here, and the concept of a "fractured" "ecosystem" is brought up
| a dozen times without being explained. A "venus fly trap that is
| designed to fracture"? What in the heck.
|
| VS Code is an IDE you can download and use for free from
| Microsoft. It's not some magical open-source platform/ecosystem
| thing that anyone can use for anything, which Microsoft has no
| control over. It's a product.
|
| It seems like everyone wants to make "universal" developer
| _services_, but no one wants to build or fund an IDE, or it's
| just too hard or something. That's not Microsoft's fault.
| alkonaut wrote:
| If you try to make a business building on top of it it's a risk
| you are taking. Whether vscode was partially oss or fully closed
| seems like an inconsequential detail.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'm going to get downvoted, but no one is making you use VSCode
| or Chrome/Chromium. I came across a post here that was like "I
| use Chromium, I ethically can not use Chrome." Firefox is right
| there, if you want an to support a different browser.
|
| Zed exists, it's new but it's already a very good IDE. I tested
| it with Unity and the C# support is fantastic.
|
| 20 years ago the notion Microsoft would develop dev tools for Mac
| and desktop Linux would be absurd. Now you're mad you can't just
| fork VS Code, sprinkle some tweaks on it and create a business
| around that ?
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > Zed exists, it's new but it's already a very good IDE.
|
| An IDE needs at least a working Debugger (or, to be more
| precise, a graphical interface to debugger(s)).
|
| And Zed has exactly the same problems VS Code has, minus
| actually contributing LSP and DAP (Debug Adapter Protocol) to
| "the editor community". So, Zed is actually worse in that
| regard.
| virtualritz wrote:
| > An IDE needs at least a working Debugger (or, to be more
| precise, a graphical interface to debugger(s)).
|
| For me that should read at _last_ (or not at all).
|
| While almost any IDE I ever used had a debugger (starting
| woth Borland Turbo C++) the number of times I used one I can
| count on both hands. And even then, a CLI to the debugger is
| just fine.
|
| Like with any feature an IDE may offer, there are people for
| which that very one is essential.
|
| Fair enough; but don't assume your non-negotiable X is the
| same for every other user of an IDE. It is not.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| I'm sorry, but what _is_ the difference between an editor
| and an IDE for _you_?
|
| Btw. I'm not saying that having an integrated debugger is a
| sufficient condition for an editor to be an IDE (VS Code
| isn't, Sublime Text isn't, other editors with DAP support
| aren't).
|
| > but don't assume your non-negotiable X is the same for
| every other user of an IDE. It is not.
|
| But _you_ not needing a debugger in an IDE is a reason
| something is an IDE without one, I see. Btw. I'm (normally)
| not using IDEs.
| virtualritz wrote:
| Wikipedia[1] says an "IDE normally consists of at least a
| source-code editor, build automation tools, and a
| debugger". Not that is says "normally", not "definitely".
|
| And in the next paragraph the "definition" encompassing a
| continuum of features and not a definite set is further
| clarified.
|
| My point was that "X is missing" => "this is not an IDE"
| is not true for this reason.
|
| > I'm sorry, but what _is_ the difference between an
| editor and an IDE for _you_?
|
| For me an IDE "knows" about other files I have open and
| their relationship with the one I'm editing (usually a
| "project") and it _i_ntegrates external tools/programs.
|
| An editor does not. It just lets me edit a file. Maybe it
| has syntax highlighting or folding but everything it
| offers is based on that file. A good example is SciTE
| which was my go-to for years.
|
| In an editor you can't right click on some type in the
| current file and choose "Go to definition" if that
| definition is another file.
|
| Of course there is a continuum. For example, running an
| external command is something many editors offer. And if
| your file is of a certain type they may even guess what
| the (build) command may be.
|
| When you have non-local (=outside the file you're
| editing) functionality and some integration with external
| tools I'd wager you're using an IDE of some sort.
|
| Then you can argue if that IDE ticks enough of those
| boxes defining your needs, fair enough. But you can't say
| something isn't an IDE because it is not an IDE for you.
| ;)
|
| P.S. non-negotiables for me are mostly around that VCS
| integration. But I acknowledge that other people may not
| have this need (are fine using the command line for this
| only). But that only means I would not use an IDE that
| lacks those; I would not therefore say it isn't an IDE.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_
| environ...
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > For me an IDE "knows" about other files I have open and
| their relationship with the one I'm editing (usually a
| "project") and it _i_ntegrates external tools/programs.
|
| With that definition any usable editor and vim-likes ;)
| is an IDE. I can live with that (that Zed is an editor
| comparable to them) too.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| You can always pay money for an IDE.
|
| Jet Brains says hi.
| m1keil wrote:
| In a way, VSC is the same model like Android. You can use it
| without its corporate backer, but severely limit its
| functionality in the process.
| taraparo wrote:
| Motivate the authors of your favorite vscode extensions to
| publish them at https://open-vsx.org/
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| Everybody can do that themselves, if the original maintainers
| don't want to (which is a security problem ;):
| If you are not the author, we suggest you first reach out to
| the author with an issue in their GitHub repo to request that
| they publish their extension to open-vsx.org. We've drafted a
| template with suggested content for the issue.
|
| https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx/wiki/Publishing-Extension...
|
| Such "3rd party extensions" don't get the "verified publisher"
| icon (or at least should not get it ;).
| ghuntley wrote:
| Encourage you to look at the bigger picture. What happens when
| there's an official extension by a 3rd party vendor SDK that
| defines a dependency on the proprietary language
| server/extension. It'll work fine for "Visual Studio Code" but
| all these OSS forks (inc recent venture capital funding for AI
| ones) gets wrecked. It turns into a game of having to iterate
| through the graph and trying to convince official SDKs to
| change their product direction.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| The author forgot about two very important "closed" plugins:
| "Remote SSH" and "Dev Containers".
| arandomhuman wrote:
| If you don't like it don't use it, vim/nvm and eMacs exist and
| are very capable editors without compromising on ecosystem.
| devjab wrote:
| I think DoomEmacs is worth a recommendation as an add on to
| what you're saying. As it's basically "slow" nvim with all
| batteries included + Org mode.
|
| It's was a very easy switch for me from VScode at least, and
| while I called it "slow" that is because nvim is ridiculously
| fast. DoomEmacs performance is still great, for the most part.
| arandomhuman wrote:
| yeah I agree I think most devs that has used one of these
| distributions would be hard pressed to go back to vscode if
| they care about their IDE/text editor being open source - not
| to mention it can be a lot of fun extending them in ways that
| are personal to your workflow. Complaining about a massive
| corporate entity being self serving is kind of missing the
| hills for the trees.
| morgante wrote:
| The clearest way to understand it is that VS Code is open core
| software.
|
| There's actually a lot in that core, especially when you compare
| it to other open core products (ex. Gitlab). Enough that you can
| fork it and have a viable MVP for your own IDE (as Cursor,
| Gitpod, and many others have done)
|
| But you shouldn't ever be under the impression that you fork will
| be identical to VS Code.
|
| Frankly I think developers have benefited a lot from this.
| There's actually a strong foundation for others to innovate on
| their own IDEs without sinking years into basic R&D, and it's
| much better than the alternative era when ~all the user-friendly
| IDEs were proprietary.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| IntelliJ has been open source (or open core if you like) for
| many years now, I think even pre-dating VS Code. So the idea
| that it's the first or only IDE that works this way is wrong.
| Myrmornis wrote:
| I'd find this article easier to follow if it separated complaints
| about telemetry from genuine restrictions.
| locallost wrote:
| I think OSS is great, but it's not why I use VS Code. I use it
| because it solved my problem of having a capable editor that is
| not a monstrosity (e.g. Eclipse etc). There are others in this
| space, I guess most famously Sublime, but VS Code always felt the
| least in the way. There was Adobe Brackets before it that was
| similar, but somehow very slow and buggy.
|
| The article makes valid points, if you are an OSS enthusiast. But
| at the end of the day, you always have the source code and you
| can always run your marketplace. This costs time and money, but
| if you believe in the idea you have to invest something and not
| depend on a mega corporation. If there are proprietary extensions
| that you can't have that sucks, but again someone can build an
| OSS one.
|
| But overall I agree with the article, I just have no illusions
| they are doing anything out of belief in open source, and I'm
| fine with it because worst case I have other options.
| Myrmornis wrote:
| A few weeks ago I switched to Cursor. Everything seems to work
| unchanged -- all my extensions, the marketplace etc. That seems
| to contradict various things in this article, for example the
| claim that certain programming languages couldn't have the
| standard extension support in forks.
| dagw wrote:
| Are you using Microsoft's Python extension? That seems to be
| the main one that breaks for people, including me.
|
| Also Microsoft's remote and container development tools only
| work on the official VS Code.
| advael wrote:
| Haven't yet seen a reason to use VSCode and can't anticipate I
| will
|
| As an editor it's a pain in the ass, as an ecosystem it feels
| like a fucken freemium mobile game for how polluted and nickel-
| and-dimey extensions are, and worst of all it's owned by
| microsoft so while this article is informative on the specifics,
| I knew from the jump there was some legal fuckery involved
| because there literally always is
|
| I can't be a total purist and never use a tool that's connected
| to a large tech company's ecosystem, but where at all possible
| one should, and this is only becoming more true
| h1fra wrote:
| Not going to defend Microsoft but they provided a massive
| codebase for free and yeah they have built a product on top, that
| is mostly free. If you fork you just don't have access to MS
| servers. Not fair enough?
|
| Also Monaco is the best editor by a thousand miles, front-ends
| are just using this editor because it's the best. We used to
| install CodeMirror or Ace when they were the best options.
|
| I'm not sure there was a massive master plan behind the creation
| of Monaco, on the contrary, they saw an opportunity to make it a
| standalone project that unlocked countless of web UI.
| virtualritz wrote:
| I switched to Zed a month ago and never opened VSCode since.
|
| But I write 99% Rust so that's kind of a match made in heaven.
|
| That said and though OT: I'd be curious what similar caveats may
| apply to that editor?
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > I'd be curious what similar caveats may apply to that editor?
|
| Exactly the same as to VS Code, anything that is special about
| it is "closed" (as a service) https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-
| open-source
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Does zed have vi keybindings? I searched the extensions page
| but didn't see any.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| It's not an extension. First-class modal
| editing via Vim bindings, including features like text
| objects and marks.
|
| See the "Vim-friendly" button at https://zed.dev/,
| "Incredibly powerful out of the box" section.
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| It baffles me how people just keep expecting stuff to be _free_.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > People when a piece of software is source-available but not
| strictly OSS: outrage
|
| Also people who in some contexts could be _infinitely_ more
| productive with their favorite editor by not being forced to work
| with an IDE. One thing is developing for the desktop where having
| a form editor becomes handy, therefore KDevelop or Lazarus make
| sense, but why in the world should one be forced to use that
| behemoth for a small set of .c or any other language files where
| a well thought makefile can rule them all? Do I have to install
| and configure vscode for a short source that would run on a
| microcontroller? Really? I see more and more projects requiring
| vscode, and that is not good if they don 't actually need it
| (YMMV of course): turning a set of sources and their makefile in
| a IDE project isn't hard, doing the opposite is often a
| nightmare.
| rafram wrote:
| Needs a better thesis statement and organization. I read the
| whole thing and I'm still not sure what "designed to fracture"
| means.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| This is giving MS a lot of credit for having a long term plan.
|
| Isn't it just that all companies want to extend/embrace/control.
| This has happened with a lot of Open Source products recently.
| Didn't this just happen with Redis this year.?
|
| "The mission of the Microsoft Developer Division is to earn the
| trust and love of developers across all languages and platforms
| and make them successful as they build the applications of the
| future."
|
| Maybe the simpler explanation is that they want to make a good
| product? Which will mean it spreads out, and they do need some
| amount of control, thus the 'official' build.
|
| Of course, they are also shady. I lived through the Explorer
| lawsuit days. But even then, I think they stumbled into it, they
| didn't have much of a plan beyond control.
|
| All companies want to extend and control.
|
| OSS was supposed to be a counter to this.
|
| But seems like without some kind of 'pay' model where developers
| can actually 'live' and contribute, it eventually falls apart.
| There are just not as many people willing to spend nights and
| weekends developing and especially SUPPORTING OSS for free. So
| any OSS tools that are good and widespread, and don't have some
| support like research funding, get co-opted.
|
| Maybe a non-profit company is the best way. But we've seen how
| that turns out if it actually takes off, like OpenAI.
| wg0 wrote:
| Nobody deserves VS code for free. Actually nobody deserves
| anything for free. Alternative would be pay for bloated
| commercial IDEs.
|
| VS code is decent, all rounder, free, open enough to be forked.
|
| And people forget that it's marvel of engineering. Go look
| through code. That doesn't get produced for free.
|
| Microsoft or any company owes nothing for free to anyone
| whatsoever. This entitlement syndrome needs to be in check.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| I paid for jetbrains stuff for many years because it was worth
| it. And compared to eclipses features et it was leagues above.
|
| That's worth money.
|
| Like I always say about open source. I'm skeptical about
| adapting frameworks without big money behind them... Because
| relying on the whims of random internet amazing engineer is a
| risk.
|
| MS will make money on vscode. Just like Google makes money on
| Chrome. Just not directly.
| grandma_tea wrote:
| It's tough because proprietary software also has risks.
|
| See the Unity license change fiasco.
| https://www.engadget.com/unity-apologizes-and-promises-to-
| ch...
| cobertos wrote:
| True, slap a price on it. I'm sure people here get enough
| utility out of VSCode to pay for it.
|
| The problem is when the free offering is actually designed to
| ensnare you in a tarpit of legal liability and uncapped
| financial liability. Especially with a service like VSCode
| where it's not a single purchase and you rely on Microsoft
| indefinitely (through extensions and updates). But it's
| designed that way. There's no other option. They chose to not
| make it simple to avoid a single clean payment, and extract
| longer term money of ambiguous amount based on user resistance.
| speed_spread wrote:
| A marvel of engineering, really? In find using bloated browser
| tech and napkin-designed language to build a barely functional
| IDE as "impressive" as building a mile-long pedestrian bridge
| using Popsicle sticks and chewing gum.
| alxjrvs wrote:
| To be fair, a (stable, used by many for many years) mile-long
| pedestrian bridge constructed out of popsicle sticks and
| chewing gum _would_ be a fairly impressive feat.
| armada651 wrote:
| > The source code has been released by Microsoft under the open-
| source MIT license, but the product available for download
| (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this proprietary license.
|
| I used to consider releasing software under the MIT license to be
| more generous since there are no conditions other than
| attribution. However by now I can see that releasing under a
| copyleft is actually more generous than a permissive license
| since the copyleft conditions also binds the author of the
| software to continue releasing their code under an open-source
| license. Turns out Richard Stallman was right after all.
| jlokier wrote:
| The author of software (or generally the copyright holder) is
| not bound by the terms of their own license, so they can
| publish the same software and/or later versions under different
| licenses however they see fit.
|
| This applies equally if their own license is MIT or if it's
| GPL/copyleft.
|
| (From that point of view, Microsoft would be able to release
| VSCode as GPL while also shipping binaries under a proprietary
| license, if they wanted to.)
|
| Things get more complicated when they aren't really the authors
| because they have merged contributions from other authors, e.g.
| pull requests. Then what happens depends on the license used by
| the other authors for their contributions. Sometimes the
| contribution's license is implied, or legally unclear. To avoid
| problems, some diligent organisations require contributors to
| sign or confirm something to make it clearer, before they
| accept contributions to be merged.
| armada651 wrote:
| In understand that, but if people license their work under an
| MIT license then there is nothing impeding whoever manages
| the repository to slap a new license on the code even if
| people already contributed to it.
|
| > To avoid problems, some diligent organisations require
| contributors to sign or confirm something to make it clearer,
| before they accept contributions to be merged.
|
| That's a very generous way of saying they're having people
| sign away their rights under a copy-left license.
| movedx wrote:
| In light of this post, and ignoring Sublime Text as I've tried it
| and don't like it, what commercial IDEs are worth looking at for
| a generalist like me who bounces between C, Python, Terraform,
| YAML, Markdown, and more? I'm on Linux.
| joshstrange wrote:
| JetBrains IDEA. It can do pretty much everything and has been
| my daily driver for almost a decade now.
| movedx wrote:
| I was just looking at their products. Looks like IDEA is
| aimed at Java developers, but I assume that doesn't prevent
| it being used for other languages?
| noworriesnate wrote:
| Specifically you should look at the JetBrains All Products
| Pack. That's what I have and I've used Pycharm, CLion,
| Datagrip and Rider extensively. I love being able to switch
| languages without having to learn a new interface, keyboard
| shortcuts, etc. You get a nice JetBrains Toolbox app to
| manage all your IDEs.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Agreed. The price between just IDEA and the all products
| pack is not terribly different and I enjoy using IDEA and
| Datagrip. I've also played with a few other of their IDEs
| and it's nice to not have to learn anything new. That
| said, I do 99% of my work in IDEA since it can do pretty
| much everything.
| dagw wrote:
| My only major complaint about JetBrains is that they make
| me switch programs when switching languages. I have a
| license for CLion and PyCharm Pro, and while they're both
| great, the fact that I cannot 'import' all the features
| from one into the other is quite infuriating.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| Pretty sure you can do this in the Ultimate version? You
| just install the necessary plugins.
| AndroidKitKat wrote:
| That's what I do. I can program my Go, Python, Java, and
| JavaScript projects all within IDEA Ultimate by just
| installing the extension from the marketplace. The only
| exceptions are C/C++ and Rust that 'require' a different
| IDE or paid extension and don't work in IDEA Ultimate for
| whatever reason.
| dagw wrote:
| The Ultimate version has very primitive C++ support last
| time I checked. Nothing compared to what they offer with
| CLion.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| Second Jetbrains' Intellij - Ultimate is all you need. Never
| really understood the point of the standalones.
|
| I've tried other editors, including VS Code, because it was
| free. I always come back to Intellij.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| Do you guys think Microsoft is pissed that Cursor exists? Do you
| think there are internal execs raging about the decision to open
| source VS Code because of it?
| diggan wrote:
| They're probably asking themselves how Meta/Facebook is able to
| misappropriate "Open Source" to mean something completely
| different, and how they can do so themselves now while still
| showing "Microsoft <3 Open Source" ads.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| I can give you one data point. There is no way in hell my
| company would let us use cursor. Generative AI is viewed with a
| lot of skepticism, and we spent a long time testing out copilot
| before approving it for all developers to use. We use copilot
| because microsoft is so trusted and we use many microsoft
| products
| crabbone wrote:
| When reading the article, I remembered the joke about a
| radiologist looking at the patient's CT and going: "Ooooh, this
| is good! And this is so good! Just perfect!" while the patient is
| in the room. The patient: "But, doctor, I don't feel good at
| all!" To which the radiologist answers: "It's soooo good none of
| these are _my_ problems! "
|
| I don't use VSCode and never will. It's just an awful editor,
| regardless of who's peddling it. None of the things that are
| important to me are controlled or somehow touched by Microsoft.
|
| But, I'm undecided about what's the right thing to do here: if I
| dislike both Microsoft and VSCode being, essentially, a closed-
| source product sprinkled with open-source, do I side with people
| who want this piece of junk and fight to make it truly open-
| source or wait to see it inevitably die a fiery death?
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