[foob]

This is separate from the telemetry, but I suspect that part of the roadmap is for LSP extensions to become monthly subscription services eventually. We currently see hints of that from two directions: 1) the introduction of GitHub Copilot as a paid service, and 2) the aforementioned move towards proprietary and DRM protected LSPs. It's not hard to imagine how these two might converge in the future. I'm sure that the performance of these LSPs will be extremely impressive and that it will be rational for many individual developers to pay for them. This will in turn pull mind share and community involvement away from FOSS solutions, and the gap between the two will widen over time as a result.

[vladvasiliu]

Oh, I'm not at all against companies making a buck selling software. I'm a happy JetBrains customer for my IDE needs, and I'm not even a "professional" developer.

But why would they force the use of their "official" VS Code build for this? Couldn't they just charge for their "impressive" plugins, regardless of the edition of VS Code used? The JetBrains "community" IDEs (open source and gratis) can use paid plugins from their marketplace.

[foob]

I'm not against selling developer tools either, but I do have a problem with EEE as a strategy. As far as I know, JetBrains has never engaged with this behavior and they have coexisted in a healthy way with fully open source alternatives. The point of Microsoft's strategy isn't to only produce a better product, but to actively hurt open alternatives by driving down their adoption through insidious and disingenuous means. They're not just trying to compete in the market, they're trying to monopolize it.

The idea behind LSP and Microsoft's initial open source work on LSP were both excellent. That launched seven years ago, and I don't think that we would have seen the near universal adoption of LSP among open source editors nor the dominance of VS Code among developers if they had been paid products from the start. Now that they have a large enough market share, they can make the LSP engines proprietary without most developers even noticing. The gap between the proprietary and open source solutions can now be widened both by the open source community shrinking and by Microsoft pumping money into improving their LSP engines. The more that gap widens, the more people migrate to VS Code from open alternatives. That becomes a self-reinforcing loop.

Once VS Code is significantly better than open source alternatives and they have a huge market share, Microsoft is in a very strong position to start collecting rent. Switching costs on an editor are nontrivial to begin with, and are enhanced by the induced atrophy of open source alternatives. Despite the fact that this strategy takes more than a decade to execute, I would guess that it ends better for Microsoft overall than if they were to start charging for VS Code back in 2016.

[vladvasiliu]

So do you think their goal is to reel back in the people who had already left OG VS and also a bunch of new ones by slowly boiling the frog with the closed distribution of vscode, which will gradually have all the best features and, maybe, in the end, become paid again? I would have thought that they were merely trying to push their own cloud and cloud-adjacent ecosystem, which I expect to be the real cash cows.

[nerdponx]

Maybe instead of "embrace, extend, extinguish", it's "promote, extend, prevent competitors from extending, then charge for extensions".

Paid monthly premium LSP subscription honestly would be a great idea from a business perspective, even though it's distasteful.