[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.

[Rohansi]

Still doesn't make any sense. Visual Studio (not Code) has been available since the 90s. The free Community edition has existed since 2014. Sublime Text, Atom, etc. came during that time and did just fine.

> 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?

I don't think a lack of developers is holding them back. They just don't appeal to most people because they run in a terminal or are vim/emacs-focused.

> I rather have this be guided by a consortium of developers in the form of open source grants.

You'd likely end up with the same result. That grant money would come from a finite pool of money, how much money do you think would go to editors targeting niche users vs. editors with broad appeal?

[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.)