[WhyNotHugo]

> What good is it for a company if the only products people end up using are the ones given for free?

I think Facebook helps answer that question a bit: just because someone is a user doesn't mean they're not the product.

Giving out one product if it helps other ulterior motives is still profit. Vertical integration also plays a part in this. Especially if the paid product re-invents something in a non-standard way, and then the free product only supports than.

[azemetre]

That's fair but I thought we were talking about in the sense of software companies? Facebook makes a large majority of their money through advertising, not the amount of installs they get from pytorch or react.

What sort of advertising can you honestly inject into something like VS Code to keep users from leaving?

I do agree about vertical integration, another user mentioned using VS Code and Github as a means to introduce Azure. That makes more sense to me and I neglected the thought.