[fr4nkr]

My point about VSC is that brands itself as "open source" when Microsoft clearly intends for it to have a proprietary, tightly controlled ecosystem. It's not just RMS-unapproved, it's practically a lie. You can use it as a FOSS editor, but only if you are willing to accept a vastly subpar experience. Oh, and they've started cracking down on people using their proprietary VSC plugins in derived editors, too.

I expected it to be a little less convenient to leave Microsoft's beaten path. I did not expect it to be a massive waste of time. This is what I meant by futile. Not only is it apparently very brittle, it's missing large swaths of VSC's ecosystem. Hell, I don't even know if the extension I wanted is available on OpenVSX because it's still down!

If Microsoft hadn't openwashed their product, I wouldn't care nearly as much.

Besides, Emacs still provides a streamlined system for managing packages on top of being hackable. It even makes installing and upgrading packages straight from a Git repo easy. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too.

[mrlongroots]

Exactly this.

For me, the C/C++ language pack stopped working overnight with Cursor. This was clearly because of commercial concerns about derivative IDEs fairly and squarely gaining traction over the original product. But it broke my workflow a couple hours before a meeting.

I use neovim with LSPs and this is unimaginable in my world. I have started using IDEs only because the productivity gains from better LLM integration are undeniable. Sure I moved to clangd in Cursor and it was all fine, but the IDE actively pushes you to install Microsoft extensions, that can be yanked off whenever some Msft PM decides "oh we didn't actually want our competitors to be making money".

LLVM/GCC/Neovim/Apache projects are open-source. Anything that is "open-source until it is not" is not open source, and this perfectly describes VSCode today.

[firejake308]

I saw someone mention Avante on here a few days ago, which looks like it tries to emulate the Cursor experience in Neovim. Might be worth a look: https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim

[bayindirh]

When people started to toot the horn of VSCode, esp. younger, inexperienced people, I personally warned quite a few of them about Microsoft's practices and motivations. Of course, who listens to a graybeard who's talking about impending doom? All answered " Microsoft <3 Open Source, what are you talking about?"

And here we are.

I hate to be right about things sometimes.

[cortesoft]

> You can use it as a FOSS editor, but only if you are willing to accept a vastly subpar experience.

Why is this Microsoft's fault, though? Nothing is stopping the open source community from creating a more resilient extension distribution system.

[throwup238]

The problem isn't the distribution system, it's the licenses on the flagship Microsoft extensions that provide C/C++, Python, Javascript/Typescript, etc. support. Those licenses are entirely Microsoft's fault.

[jhanschoo]

My 2pence. C/C++ experience on VSCode is still subpar compared to other IDEs. Python is good, but very viable alternatives to VSCode exist. The biggest unique value proposition regarding languages is in TypeScript support. Support for many other languages still come from authorities from those languages who have no issue making them available on the open registry.

For me, the killer proprietary extension is their remote development extensions.

[miohtama]

Language servers are open source. One can write your own extension like we do today for Vim and Emacs.

There is no reason we should expect Microsoft to invest tens of millions of dollars into a product development and give it free for competitors like Cursor. That's not just rational, even for companies that are not Microsoft.

[filmgirlcw]

100% this. It would be one thing if the only LSPs you could build came from Microsoft, but that’s just not true. It’s just that developing LSPs isn’t free.

Cursor, Windsurf, etc. are building multi-billion dollar businesses off the backs of the work that the VS Code team has done. And that’s totally fine! What’s not fine, is trying to have access to the whole ecosystem of first party extensions that aren’t MIT licensed.

I agree there should be more resilient extension repos, but this is one of the problems Eclipse Theia [0] has tried to take on, but most projects just fork the core VS Code experience and slot in OpenVSX rather than doing the hard, expensive work of building their own extension marketplaces or LSPs. And you know what, for a community or OSS fork, I think that’s fair. I think when you raise hundreds of millions in funding, you can build your own LSPs and start to maintain your own infra for extensions. And if you’ve got enough buy-in, you can probably convince developers to submit directly to your marketplace too.

And it isn’t even a rug pull, per se. The first changes to the license on some of the 1P VS Code extensions probably happened in late 2018 or early 2019, with remote share. The LSPs may have changed later. If anything, the Code team was probably too lax about letting the commercial forks use their resources wholesale against the license terms for as long as they did.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft and then at GitHub with things that touched VS Code. I now work at Google, who uses VS Code (well Monaco) inside some of our editors/products, but I don’t work on any of those.

[0]: https://theia-ide.org/

[throwup238]

> There is no reason we should expect Microsoft to invest tens of millions of dollars into a product development and give it free for competitors like Cursor. That's not just rational, even for companies that are not Microsoft.

It's an "open source" IDE. It costs nothing. All of the money they make from it is on top of the integrations like Azure Devops and Github that would make just as much money (if not even more thanks to vibe coding increasing accessibility) in Cursor, Windsurf, and VSCodium. Microsoft isn't a charity and they've been investing those tens of millions of dollars for a reason: to get a return. That's fine, that's what capitalism is (like it or not).

What's not fine is their schizophrenic approach to open source that looks very much like the classic Micro$oft embrace, extend, extinguish*. They're literally trying to extinguish competitors that are doing better than them by restricting the ecosystem after supposedly and ostensibly embracing open source. I lived through the IE6 era and this doesn't feel much different. Same player, slightly different game.

It's probably driven by some politically powerful PM or VP who perfectly resembles the Dilbert principle. Just like the degradation happening in the Windows OS front, it's just Conway's law happening all over again.

* Which if I may remind everyone, is a phrase straight out of the DOJ's discovery. Microsoft came up with the term.

[watusername]

I wonder if more differentiated branding would have helped. Chrome/Chromium is another example that came to mind: Like "Code - OSS" (the open-source base of VSCode), Chromium works just fine as a browser but with fewer Google-related features (syncing, DRM, etc). People seem to happily use Chromium despite the limitations (many actively seek them!), and I don't remember there being a controversy like this.

[pdntspa]

It's very easy to point VSCodium at the official MS extension marketplace. Everything works.