[pmontra]

> Microsoft is the enemy

This made me smile, sadly. I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL and the apparent goodwill about open source. Some people and I, who lived through all of Microsoft, were skeptical and believed that it was only another embrace phase of their EEE pattern. I'm not sure if they are extinguishing something but it turns out that they are squeezing money out of the pockets of their users now.

[nine_k]

Microsoft is big, internally incoherent (even inimical, according to some accounts), and people responsible for VSCode and WSL are likely totally unrelated to people determining when and how to crack MS's crown jewel, the Office suite, in an attempt to squeeze out a few dollars more.

[hotstickyballs]

That's why anything that goes against the long-established corporate culture aren't likely to stay around for long.

[emodendroket]

Visual Studio Code has been around over a decade and there is zero indication it's going anywhere.

[adithyassekhar]

Apart from academics, who are forced to stay away from ai, i feel vs code will regress to a code reader as the models improve.

[shimman]

Why are we acting like VS Code is nothing but a way to stop independent developers from selling their tools? Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades.

MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for several decades and if luck we with us indefinitely.

[gucci-on-fleek]

> Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades.

VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.

> MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company

I'm pretty sure that all of those (aside from Xbox) are profitable on their own, so I don't think that them becoming independent would kneecap them at all.

[jayceekay]

They said cottage industry, not software industry.

Edit: s/he/they/woops sorry

[emodendroket]

OK but is that even true? Lots of people buy IntelliJ licenses (or if they've stopped I'm guessing it has more to do with Claude Code than VS Code).

[pmontra]

By the way, Claude Code works well from inside emacs.

[watermelon0]

Is GitHub really profitable, considering how much Actions credits are given away to open source projects as well as free users? Same goes for Copilot.

[gucci-on-fleek]

> Is GitHub really profitable

Well I had assumed that GitHub was profitable, since it used to be independent, and it feels like it should be profitable right now. But I tried Googling "is GitHub profitable" just now, and the first few results seem to suggest that either it's still losing money or that nobody knows. So I was likely incorrect about that point, sorry.

> considering how much Actions credits are given away to open source projects as well as free users?

GitLab does the same thing, and they are definitely profitable [0], so that on its own isn't necessarily a barrier.

[0]: https://ir.gitlab.com/news/news-details/2026/GitLab-Reports-...

[ornornor]

> VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.

Why not? That’s 11 years, times (say) 5 potential independent editors or IDE that didn’t exist because of VSCode in that time is over 50 years worth of software innovation.

[Rohansi]

How does the existence of VSCode stop the creation of other editors? The existence of other editors clearly didn't prevent VSCode from being created, so what's different?

[shimman]

Oh easy, you can't compete with a trillion dollar corporation that can subsidize loss leaders. We know there is a substantial market in this space if Zed is able to raised $30mil, but only letting VC or big tech dictate the direction of tooling is extremely troublesome.

I, along with every other person in tech I know, would love to start a company but the biggest risk is lack of health insurance; which is why things like medicare for all are sorely needed if we want to improve the space by introducing more competition.

Which is why you also need to specifically tax companies like MSFT to publicly subsidize alternatives.

I mean how much would something like neovim or emacs or helix or neovide improve if they could hire a team of full time developers? Why should economic value both be dictated and captured by a small set of people? I rather have this be guided by a consortium of developers in the form of open source grants.

[nine_k]

Have releases of other open-source tools destroyed cottage industries? Certainly they have, to an extent.

Would it be better if most tools you use were proprietary, built by cottage industries? I doubt it. Especially if we notice that cottage industries tend to consolidate, and the few remaining players are rarely very community-oriented.

[shimman]

No, what would be better is creating a VAT against big tech and VC investments so that the public can decide what technology is worth developing.

If the VAT amounted to $10,000,000,000 of tax revenue annually (something that is quite easy to do against an industry that has several trillion dollar corporations) that is enough to 100,000 open source projects with $100,000 grants.

This would literally unleash to much economic value that would be truly controlled by the public.

That is the future I want to build towards, anything that gives people more power against corporations and in the software world that means funding open source.

I can't think of a single open source dev that wouldn't mind a $100,000 grant for the likely millions they provide in economic value.

[fithisux]

I started migrating away for VSCode, piece by piece.

But if you need it:

Theia/Positron/VSCodium

For Python/Julia? Many alternatives. For C family? Similar Java/Go? Similar.

[WesolyKubeczek]

I keep VSCode because their seamless SSH integration (remote files editing) is so damn good.

[fithisux]

Filezilla Portable for me. I never use SSH through VSCode. Most of the people I work with, do.

VSCode is a binary product and therefore it is dangerous.

[WesolyKubeczek]

I don't want to have high friction from having to copy files to my host then back. I also don't want to experience latency from editing remotely. Thus, this.

[nine_k]

Emacs had it first ;-D (And still does.)

[AnonymousPlanet]

A lot of developers (and thereby most on HN, I guess) see Microsoft only from the perspective of a private consumer. From the perspective of a normal non-technical company though, Microsoft is this giant that has spread its products throughout your organisation like a cancer and you can never free yourself from it. For Microsoft's main business it's irrelevant if VSCode is mostly open source or not. That is why these gestures never meant anything in the first place.

It doesn't matter if some Microsoft trinkets are open sourced while AD is not and while you still can't connect your open source DNS and DHCP server to a Microsoft domain controller. Or have your open source email client be 100% compatible with the proprietary Exchange protocol.

[thewebguyd]

There's also business value in "good enough" that Microsoft satisfies for enterprises. You get a lot of stuff "for free" with something like an E5 license: EDR, DLP, MDM, a full cloud IAM system, and a ton of cross app magic for the lowest common denominator of non-technical employees that you just aren't going to get without spending considerable developer effort to piece together a stack yourself.

What looks like cancer to us looks like a massive reduction in operational risk to a CFO/CIO.

This is especially true if your core business has nothing to do with software or tech. Much easier to cut a check to Redmond. Microsoft is basically a utility company for enterprise now, it's commoditized IT. "Do what you do best, outsource the rest."

[jijji]

I think Microsoft stopped being the "darling" in 1994 when they got sued by Stacker and had to pay $120 million for stealing their source code and using it in their own product.

[userbinator]

They're open-sourcing things either because they get no value from them anymore, or just want more unpaid "community" labour.

[emodendroket]

OK well that's the whole "open source" model. It's not some Microsoft perversion of it. The reason they moved from "free software" to "open source" was specifically rejecting the ideological stuff that would prevent business exploitation

[mppm]

> I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL

I was genuinely puzzled by that, actually. I thought it quite obvious from the start that Nadella is no longer interested in Windows and other Microsoft software as products and will be moving them to thin cloud wrappers, but for some reason people were really optimistic about the "New Microsoft".

[olyjohn]

I remember going to Linuxfest NW some years ago. Microsoft had a big booth there... "MICROSOFT <3 LINUX"

I couldn't believe how many people sucked that shit up.