Remember vs code is designed to fracture and the forks are an integral part of that. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

jeroenhd 2 months ago | parent | next [-]

I fail to see the problem with this, to be honest. Microsoft provides a free IDE for everyone to use on any platform, but it's not good enough because the language runtimes and proprietary third party tools aren't completely free?

Maybe Microsoft should've made VSCode source-available. Sure, companies taking Microsoft's free labour would need to develop an IDE of their own (or maybe someone can hack Eclipse to work as a browser project?), but at least Microsoft wouldn't take the heat for not doing enough free work for everyone else.

	▲	esperent 2 months ago \| parent [-]
		> at least Microsoft wouldn't take the heat for not doing enough free work for everyone else You're massively misunderstanding the goals of these large companies who provide open source projects, whether it's VSCode, Android, Chrome, or whatever. The goal is always control. Companies at this scale never do free work for the common good. I don't say this to deride them, I say it as a statement of fact that we all need to be aware of when we choose to use these products.

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theanonymousone 2 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But hasn't Coder.com[0] built a business around exactly that?

[0] https://github.com/coder/code-server

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ghuntley 2 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for the share. Yeah, building upon VSCode (MIT) is a stupid idea. Regarding OpenVSX, it was developed whilst I was at Gitpod and transferred to the Eclipse Foundation. It's been many years now, so my memory might be a little dated as to what came first, but OpenVSX/Gitpod/Thiea/Eclipse origins can all be traced back to https://www.typefox.io/.

Anyway. OpenVSX is classic XKCD https://xkcd.com/2347/ territory—run by a small crew of brilliant volunteers, but the entire world depends/freeloads upon them.

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aaronvg 2 months ago | parent | next [-]

it's kind of wild -- none of the multimillion dollar VSCode forks (Cursor, windsurf) are working properly at the moment. It seems open-vsx is quite a vulnerable single point of failure. Searching extensions gives a 503.

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0cf8612b2e1e 2 months ago | parent [-]

Is that any different from a GitHub/AWS outage?

	▲	nawgz 2 months ago \| parent [-]
		Yes - no one is making 7 figures in order to keep OpenVSX online

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devsda 2 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Couple of years ago, I think openvsx faced funding crunch and on the verge of the shutdown a dedicated working group was formed (including big names like Google, Salesforce etc) to support it.

Not sure if this outage and its long duration is due to some technical difficulty or an indication of something worse.