There was that bit a few years back where the HN folk saw Satya as the second coming of Microsoft and anything even slightly critical or suspicious of Microsoft was downvoted to oblivion as highly implausible. I think people are still coming down from that high.
He's not the messiah, he's a naughty businessman!
(Note: I shot my HN account then because the majority of the MS stuff on here was utterly intolerable for many of us who have been MS devs/users since day zero and have the mental scarring)
Edit: remind me to post this when MS staff are still asleep next time...
> if/when they do that there will be a community fork
One would hope, but if all the project’s experts are hired and have been working for a company that closed their once open source project, forks will have a hard time surviving.
That’s why redis and elastic search didn’t see an explosion of popular forks.
Terraform has opentofu, but I haven’t looked in on them in a while.
I don’t believe there are any Atom forks around since Microsoft killed that project after aquiring GitHub.
Also, the actual Visual Studio code you download from their website is NOT fully open source. It contains closed source extensions and configurations.
I mean, Microsoft has been very clear about their business model of VSCode -- similar to Chromium, the base product is free and you can do whatever you want (and indeed there are lots of products reusing the core of VSCode), but extension marketplace/remote/GitHub Copilot are proprietary. It sounds like a fair deal to me -- Microsoft can't just do open source without expecting to get something in return.
Now, coming back to private APIs, it's hard to know whether this is because Microsoft intentionally wants to keep competition out, or it is just hard to standardize/finalize APIs. I do know that VSCode development team takes extreme care when it comes to their APIs -- new features can take years before they are ready (most recenly coverage APIs, for example), and they don't want to release something when it's not ready, and I respect that. And to be fair, they have a number of "inline completion" APIs standardized as both VSCode APIs and LSP protocol (upcoming). I'm sure there is a lot to be desired, but it should be a nuanced discussion instead of simply "Microsoft bad".
(I am a VSCode extension & LSP author, not affiliated with Microsoft at all)
Do you have any links or resources you could direct me toward that were more helpful than Microsoft's basic how-to pages for learning VS Code plugin development? I attempted to build a VS Code extension, but the attempt fizzled out. I managed to make some progress in creating the simplest of UI elements and populating them. I'm particularly interested in building a GUI-based editor of JSON / YAML where a user can select a value from a prepopulated dropdown menu, or validating a JSON / YAML file against a custom schema. Any help or advice you could provide would be appreciated!
What's the harm here if the APIs are temporary and they don't have a history of elongating the lives of temporary APIs like this? They've stated the purpose of these "proposed APIs" and we have no evidence from the last decade to believe they'd renege on their stated goals.
The harm is that third-party developers aren't allowed to publish extensions that use "proposed APIs", but Copilot doesn't have to follow these rules because Microsoft both develops the extension and runs the Extension Marketplace website. Microsoft is therefore able to add functionality to their extension that third-party developers can only add by forking VS Code. VS Code forks lose access to the Extension Marketplace, and many Microsoft-published extensions (such as Pylance and LiveShare) will only run on official Microsoft builds of VS Code, not forks.
When did they stop?