As VSCode is good enough, there is no oxygen for an open source effort to reinvent that wheel. At some point it will stale long enough that some bigger communities will want to tackle the challenge, but that won't be tomorrow.
I see VSCode as a net positive, but I think it's healthy to keep in mind the embrance->extend bigger picture.
What are we actually talking about here?
VS Code is open source, the existence of a de-microsofted alternative, that's actually just as capable (VS Codium) is just confirming this.
> there is no oxygen for an open source effort to reinvent that wheel.
Also, VS Code is just a great product. I mean, why is it a bad thing? It's not like Micrsoft is exerting as much negative control if at all on the whole ecosystem like Google did with Chrome. What I can see is that the dev's are keeping a good and healthy relationship to the users. While I see that this can change arbitrarily, given that it's Microsoft, right now you have (or at least I do) give them the benefit of the doubt.
Many important plugins are only in the official marketplace, and it's not allowed to use this marketplace from open source builds.
The practical effect is that open builds like VSCodium don't have access to things like the C# plugin, making them not useless, but much less viable than actual VS Code.
C# has a fork of the official plugin which uses NetCodeDbg by Samsung. And the language server itself is a part of the SDK anyway. It works in VSCodium without any additional effort required.
I didn't know that it isn't allowed?
VS Codium even endorses downloading the files from there and installing them in Codium. Is this against their TOS or something?
> I see VSCode as a net positive, but I think it's healthy to keep in mind the embrance->extend bigger picture.
It is a terrible point. Emacs and vim have been around for 'how' long and they are still niche and difficult to use.
VSCode made it better, especially with LSPs. Make all the terrible arguments you want. Still does not change that before more people used the Windows only VS Studio and now they can use the (mostly free) VSCode on Linux. Whatever attempt Microsoft is making to embrace Linux to prevent a possible dev shift they are still cannibalizing their VS Studio sales to do so and Vim/Emacs still does not offer a good response to Code.
It’s not. Its core is open source, but the actual build that is branded VS Code and that people download is not. I’m not even referring to many of the key extensions that many people use, such as the SSH remote and Pylance, which themselves are proprietary.
If you want to use only open source code, you need a rebuild like VSCodium.
Thirty years, two CEOs, and at least two industry redefining tidal waves ago. The people who trot out Microsoft's HTML 2.0 strategy as a reason their work 30 years later is a trap, are deep in tin foil hat land and jumping at shadows.
Look at their wall street filings for the last decade. If Microsoft is running an elaborate EEE with their open source work, that first "embrace, extend" phase is now 10+ years in and responsible for an enormous portion of their bottom line with the fastest growth rates anywhere in the company. "Extinguish" would be suicidal.
One has to wonder if these same people also think Apple still secretly doubts the "think different" vision that Steve Jobs introduced in the same time frame, and could revert to beige boxes at any time. Or that IBM is really a hardware company and will drop services any moment.
VSCode is part of their Embrace Extend Extinguish strategy.
It embraced open standards.
Then extended them with proprietary plugins.
And then extinguished alternatives by making their plugins incompatible.
Why did they buy GitHub?
Well, it turns out to be massively relevant for AI.
VSCode is well integrated with not just GitHub, but also Copilot, and Devcontainers, all of which strengthen their proprietary grip.
But GitHub provides free hosting? And offers freemium GitHub Actions.
Open source software uses these free solutions, but in doing so make their technology mainstream, to an extent where even suggesting alternative is thought ridiculous, "just use github actions bro".
Speaking of tin foil hats, the CICD pipelines could make it possible to selectively infect binaries at the distribution level, which is virtually impossible to detect, especially if the signing keys are part of the pipeline, which I assume is almost everyone. This is critical militarily.
Cloudflare is another example of a militarily interesting freemium strategy, where a vast number of businesses have allowed a man-in-the-middle, which practically defeats TLS encryption, allowing surveillance. And, selectively and virtually impossible to prove, could hijack your cookies, and gain access to all kinds of things. And infect the binaries you download.
Which is to say that EEE strategy is extremely powerful and effective. Otherwise, why would companies surrender the security of their users so readily?
However, "hard to connect" with Microsoft, is not the case. When it came from their own notes. It's also not hard to connect IBM with the Fuhrer, but that's also in the past. Doesn't mean it never happened, though.
"Extinguish" is about their competition, not the extended product/field. They will always invest to embrace and extend, that's the condition to outpace and cut off the competitors.
This is part of parent's point IMHO.
As VSCode is good enough, there is no oxygen for an open source effort to reinvent that wheel. At some point it will stale long enough that some bigger communities will want to tackle the challenge, but that won't be tomorrow.
I see VSCode as a net positive, but I think it's healthy to keep in mind the embrance->extend bigger picture.