[smaudet]

Their support is also often stellar - if something breaks in a free product, get ready for some free support also (read, none, DIY).

And, maybe you think fixing your IDE yourself makes you a better developer - if you are building IDEs, maybe, sure. I'm more than happy to outsource that a company which does this as its bread and butter.

Microsoft, on the other hand, sells (or tries to) enterprise office solutions. They may have optimized for a single use-case (TypeScript), outside of promoting their web-strategy (typescript), I wouldn't expect them to care one lick about VSCode, once it stops being particularly important.

Its also not open source (VSCode), so I would have no qualms regarding that - there is (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode) OFC but the license for the product everyone uses is not (https://code.visualstudio.com/License/). Similar story for Jetbrains - https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea/ is open source while of course IntelliJ, Webstorm are not (https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea/)

[taink]

To be fair, there is a FOSS binary distribution of VSCode -- VSCodium[1], though it is maintained by the community. It operates in a similar way (licensing-wise) to IntelliJ IDEA Community vs. Ultimate.

[1] https://vscodium.com/