[NewsaHackO]

I hate this analogy. Just because something is open source, doesn’t mean it is forced to commit or comment on every pull request which takes development time. If that notion really bothers you, you are free to fork VSCode and close all 600 pull requests on your fork.

[jemiluv8]

Agree. OSS is hard work and not obligatory.

[Alupis]

It's a common theme across most (all?) Microsoft "Open Source" repos. They publish the codebase on Github (which implies a certain thing on it's own), but accept very little community input/contributions - if any.

These repo's will usually have half a dozen or more Microsoft Employees with "Project Manager" titles and the like - extremely "top heavy". All development, decision making, roadmap and more are done behind closed doors. PR's go dormant for months or years... Issues get some sort of cursory "thanks for the input" response from a PM... then crickets.

I'm not arguing all open source needs to be a community and accept contributions. But let's be honest - this is deliberate on Microsoft's part. They want the "good vibes" of being open source friendly - but corporate Microsoft still isn't ready to embrace open source. ie, it's fake open source.

[cyral]

I've looked at a bunch of the popular JS libraries I depend on and they are all the same story, hundreds of open PRs. I think it's just difficult to review work from random people who may not be implementing changes the right way at all. Same with the project direction/roadmap, I'd say the majority of open source repos are like that. People will suggest ideas/direction all day and you can't listen to everyone.

Not sure for VSCode, but for .NET 9 they claim: "There were over 26,000 contributions from over 9,000 community members! "

[almosthere]

f. o. r. k. everything costs money, waaaay more than a $5 buy me a coffee. Every PR MS closes costs them thousands of dollars.

[__jonas]

Why is that bad? Seems like a perfectly valid approach for an Open Source project, SQLite is doing the same.