So the main news is that they're giving up on develping an independent IDE and turning into another VS code fork. The loss of biodiversity and reliance on a no-so-reliable steward is mildly concerning.

OTOH, posit funds a lot of development of important packages in the tidyverse and does a lot of community work etc.

So if maintaining RStudio is so much of a burden that it impedes the rest of their work, I don't think it's a bad idea to reduce the amount of work spent trying to compete with VSCode when that's an increasingly tough sell.

I'm not a fan of VSCode personally, but would probably be happy with a tmux setup with a console for R and some minimal output viewer, so people like me should be able to cobble something together that's a workable alternative to Posit.

They (reps? devs? I don't remember) have recently mentioned that they won't give up on RStudio, that it will stay separate from Positron. I really hope that stays true.