In this blog post, we explore the ecosystem of open-source forks, revisit the story so far with how Microsoft has been transforming from products to services, go deep into why the Visual Studio Code ecosystem is designed to fracture, and the legal implications of this design then discuss future problems faced by the software development ecosystem if our industry continues as-is on the current path…
It’s funny because, I’m probably the minority, but I strongly prefer JetBrains IDEs.
Which ironically are much more “walled gardens”: closed-source and subscription-based, with only a limited subset of parts and plugins open-source. But JetBrains has a good track record of not enshittifying and, because you actually pay for their product, they can make a profitable business off not doing so.
Yes their stuff is great, I’ve been using rider over vs for years.
That said, for new stuff vscode is better because it’ll have a decent extension, where as jetbrains will only really support popular stuff. For example the Svelte support in the past wasn’t great, as it’s been getting more popular they brought integration with the Svelte IDE tooling.
But JetBrains has a good track record of not enshittifying and, because you actually pay for their product
I disagree.
Jetbrains is going essentially the same way with kotlin. Even though it’s open source on paper, Jetbrain is gatekeeping it to a degree where they are actively blocking changes that would make it easier for LSP developers to integrate (thus potentially creating competition to their intellij products ).
We really need open source language servers (for me to use in Emacs).
To me it’s not a cost problem, it’s just too important a tool for me to be unable to fix it when it breaks.
I’ve spent too much of my life suffering with problems in proprietary software (shout out to windows and visual studio especially) that I can’t realistically investigate, let alone fix.
All I really care about is for python code completion and semantic highlighting to work without needing pylance. Is that too much to ask?
The one good thing about enshittification is that they make the free, open-source versions the superior choice.
For once, greed actually is sometimes their undoing.
I did not understand anything
Vscode is beginning it’s enshittification cycle. They got everyone using it, now they start locking it down. Much of the fear is what Microsoft could do, not so much what they have done so far
The C# extension going proprietary is the smoke to the coming fire though, and highlights what could happen to other languages. The new extension cannot be installed on open source redistributions like vscodium. What happens now if the typescript extension gets a similar update? Or Python? Etc.
They’ve made it so technically anyone can spin off their own extensions marketplace, and attempt to make their own C#/typescript/Python extensions, but can they truly compete with Microsoft? That is the fracture the author is talking about. They’ve effectively made a walled garden out of an open source platform, they’ve just been playing nice to hook devs and companies in before the slow enshittification
“Its MIT open source and anyone can use it!”
- But Microsoft only publishes a not-MIT licensed one
- And if you DONT use that one, the extension store created by microsoft wont work
- And even if you make your own extension store (which people did for VS Codium) you legally wont be allowed to use any of the de-facto quality of life extensions (Python, SSH, Docker, C#, C++, Live Share, etc)
- And those extensions default to needing fully-closed-source tools develped by microsoft
- AND, unlike Chromium, anything that tries to fork and build on top of VS Code, (e.g. gitpod; a web-based dev environment) will die because none of the de-facto/core/quality-of-life extensions people are used to will be available. They’ll have to use the Microsoft alternative (e.g. Github workspaces)
The MIT codebase is just bait
I think when it becomes a problem it won’t be hard for the community to build their own extensions that can be used anywhere. It doesn’t hurt right now so that work hasn’t been done yet.
