I used to think GitHub Codespaces would help popularise Gitpod but now realize it is the other way around. Gitpod is currently permitted to exist in the Visual Studio Code ecosystem to popularise GitHub Codespaces, and Microsoft can step in at any moment to create legal crises that strategically divide the market from a business perspective because, like Apple and their AppStore: it is their ecosystem that they control and they are in absolute control.

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…

  • Lucky
    211·
    1 year ago

    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

    • 0x0English
      1·
      1 year ago

      That’s not enshitification, that’s Embrace-Extend-Extinguish and it predates Cory Doctorow’s ego.