Vscode is beginning it’s enshittification cycle. They got everyone using it, now they start locking it down. Much of the fear is what Microsoft could do, not so much what they have done so far

The C# extension going proprietary is the smoke to the coming fire though, and highlights what could happen to other languages. The new extension cannot be installed on open source redistributions like vscodium. What happens now if the typescript extension gets a similar update? Or Python? Etc.

They’ve made it so technically anyone can spin off their own extensions marketplace, and attempt to make their own C#/typescript/Python extensions, but can they truly compete with Microsoft? That is the fracture the author is talking about. They’ve effectively made a walled garden out of an open source platform, they’ve just been playing nice to hook devs and companies in before the slow enshittification

“Its MIT open source and anyone can use it!”

• But Microsoft only publishes a not-MIT licensed one
• And if you DONT use that one, the extension store created by microsoft wont work
• And even if you make your own extension store (which people did for VS Codium) you legally wont be allowed to use any of the de-facto quality of life extensions (Python, SSH, Docker, C#, C++, Live Share, etc)
• And those extensions default to needing fully-closed-source tools develped by microsoft
• AND, unlike Chromium, anything that tries to fork and build on top of VS Code, (e.g. gitpod; a web-based dev environment) will die because none of the de-facto/core/quality-of-life extensions people are used to will be available. They’ll have to use the Microsoft alternative (e.g. Github workspaces)

The MIT codebase is just bait