In this blog post, we explore the ecosystem of open-source forks, revisit the story so far with how Microsoft has been transforming from products to services, go deep into why the Visual Studio Code ecosystem is designed to fracture, and the legal implications of this design then discuss future problems faced by the software development ecosystem if our industry continues as-is on the current path…
It’s funny because, I’m probably the minority, but I strongly prefer JetBrains IDEs.
Which ironically are much more “walled gardens”: closed-source and subscription-based, with only a limited subset of parts and plugins open-source. But JetBrains has a good track record of not enshittifying and, because you actually pay for their product, they can make a profitable business off not doing so.
Agreed. Their business model is transparent: we give them money, they give us good products
But JetBrains has a good track record of not enshittifying and, because you actually pay for their product
I disagree.
Jetbrains is going essentially the same way with kotlin. Even though it’s open source on paper, Jetbrain is gatekeeping it to a degree where they are actively blocking changes that would make it easier for LSP developers to integrate (thus potentially creating competition to their intellij products ).
Yes their stuff is great, I’ve been using rider over vs for years.
That said, for new stuff vscode is better because it’ll have a decent extension, where as jetbrains will only really support popular stuff. For example the Svelte support in the past wasn’t great, as it’s been getting more popular they brought integration with the Svelte IDE tooling.
Same. I’m a loyal Jetbrains user, and I don’t see that changing soon.
It’s funny because, I’m probably the minority, but I strongly prefer JetBrains IDEs.
So does anyone who was forced to use eclipse.
We really need open source language servers (for me to use in Emacs).
To me it’s not a cost problem, it’s just too important a tool for me to be unable to fix it when it breaks.
I’ve spent too much of my life suffering with problems in proprietary software (shout out to windows and visual studio especially) that I can’t realistically investigate, let alone fix.
All I really care about is for python code completion and semantic highlighting to work without needing pylance. Is that too much to ask?
I did not understand anything
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
That’s not enshitification, that’s Embrace-Extend-Extinguish and it predates Cory Doctorow’s ego.
“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
I think when it becomes a problem it won’t be hard for the community to build their own extensions that can be used anywhere. It doesn’t hurt right now so that work hasn’t been done yet.
Will it ever hurt though? Its designed to make things like GitPod feel uncomfortable while making VS Code feel good.
- And if you DONT use that one, the extension store wont work
We have VSCodium and you can use a plethora of extensions with that one no problem.
The one good thing about enshittification is that they make the free, open-source versions the superior choice.
For once, greed actually is sometimes their undoing.
Visual Studio Code is a ramp to move the developer tooling ecosystem towards an end-to-end consumable services model of software development tools, and GitHub Codespaces is a white label of an existing service called Visual Studio Online aka Microsoft Dev Box aka Microsoft Azure DevTest Labs.
This part is the sum of it. I’ve been saying it for year and nobody cares. Nowadays those companies are all about re-creating and reconfiguring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We see this in everything now Docker/DockerHub/Kubernetes and GitHub actions were the first sign of this cancer.
We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some Docker BS or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.
The latest endeavor in making everyone’s hostage is the new Linux immutable distribution trend. Once again here I found myself predicting the future:
Immutable distros are all about making thing that were easy into complex, “locked down”, “inflexible”, bullshit to justify jobs and payed tech stacks and a soon to be released property solution.
We had Ansible, containers, ZFS and BTRFS that provided all the required immutability needed already but someone decided that is is time to transform proven development techniques in the hopes of eventually selling some orchestration and/or other proprietary repository / platform / BS like Docker / Kubernetes does.
“Oh but there are truly open-source immutable distros” … true, but this hype is much like Docker and it will invariably and inevitably lead people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past.
As with CentOS’s fiasco or Docker it doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of immutable distributions because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian is currently unfolding with Docker vs LXC/RKT and will happen with Ubuntu vs Debian for all those who moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.
We had good examples of immutable distributions and architectures before as any MIPS router and/or IOT device is usually immutable and there are also reasons why people are moving away from those towards more mutable ARM architectures.
Are you not a fan of NixOS?
That’s so weird, I thought everyone had already heard about neovim. Why are people still using vs code?
Now that vim has consumed the corpse of the emacs vs vim debate, it has only grown larger, and more ravenous
That’s so weird, I thought everyone had already heard about Helix. Why are people still using neovim?
I need to re-try it. I really like like lsp/dsp are first class cityzen, including the keybindings, and that there is better text objects than in vanilla neovim. Last time I tried it there was a few things that where not that easy to set-up (I forget what), but I should definitively take the time to learn it.
I just wish that neovim/kakoune/helix had a marketplace just like vscode. It make the discovery and installation so much easier when everyone use the same tools.
I love Helix but for some reason there is a heavy lack of code snippets and good autocompletion in C. Everything else is great tho
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