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by bitwize 1022 days ago
You know the "Editor Wars" meme? That was a thing because vim and Emacs were the canonical editors; you could expect just about every serious hacker (in a Unix environment) to main either one or the other.

Today, there is only one canonical editor: Visual Studio Code. 75% of professional programmers use it. Microsoft was trying to get the open source crowd back into their tooling fold -- and they've succeeded! Which means now they have a hugely expanded developer base to sell tools and services to. Remember their money is now in cloud, not desktop software -- so think things like GitHub Codespaces. (The entire devcontainer ecosystem comes from Microsoft and is oriented specifically around Visual Studio Code's model of remote development.)
1 comments
vladvasiliu 1022 days ago
Sure I do, and I enjoy flaming the occasional Emacs user I cross paths with.

But why does selling those features, especially the ones requiring a separate cloud subscription, require a specific build of an app which is otherwise open source?

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bitwize 1022 days ago
Flip it on its head, the question is, why even do an open source release? The answer is, it's pretty much a sop, much like Apple's Darwin releases or the AOSP. Good PR for the open source community to build trust and good will, while still controlling the whole platform from soup to nuts making EEE possible. If they opened up their dev tools -- their LSPs and cloud service connectivity -- to just anybody they risk losing that control.

Honestly, the more I learn about Visual Studio Code the more I understand why Emacs is the way it is. Stallman was trying to keep it fully hackable forever.

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vladvasiliu 1022 days ago
I admit, I didn't think about it under that angle.

But I do wonder how much VS Code being "kinda open source" mattered. I may be in an MS-centric bubble, but most people I interact with couldn't care less about that. They're using closed-source software all over. Their main reasons for switching to VS Code seem to be the free-as-in-beer part, and that it's more practical than the OG VisualStudio. They're 99% Windows devs.

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bitwize 1022 days ago
Yeah, they were going after the Vim and Emacs using, Linux/Mac web dev crowd. Instead of fighting Linux they're co-opting it into yet another Microsoft development platform.
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atomicnumber3 1022 days ago
Mark me down as someone using vscode because it has vscodium. Prior to vscode, I was using Geany for anything that wasn't Java (IntelliJ CE there, and prior to that, netbeans).
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