I used to think GitHub Codespaces would help popularise Gitpod but now realize it is the other way around. Gitpod is currently permitted to exist in the Visual Studio Code ecosystem to popularise GitHub Codespaces, and Microsoft can step in at any moment to create legal crises that strategically divide the market from a business perspective because, like Apple and their AppStore: it is their ecosystem that they control and they are in absolute control.

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…

  • Corngood@lemmy.ml
    5·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • unalivejoy@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    All I really care about is for python code completion and semantic highlighting to work without needing pylance. Is that too much to ask?

  • armchair_progamer@programming.dev
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • jeremyparker@programming.dev
    0·
    1 year ago

    That’s so weird, I thought everyone had already heard about neovim. Why are people still using vs code?

    Now that vim has consumed the corpse of the emacs vs vim debate, it has only grown larger, and more ravenous

    • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
      1·
      11 months ago

      “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