> Microsoft is the enemy

This made me smile, sadly. I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL and the apparent goodwill about open source. Some people and I, who lived through all of Microsoft, were skeptical and believed that it was only another embrace phase of their EEE pattern. I'm not sure if they are extinguishing something but it turns out that they are squeezing money out of the pockets of their users now.

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nine_k 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Microsoft is big, internally incoherent (even inimical, according to some accounts), and people responsible for VSCode and WSL are likely totally unrelated to people determining when and how to crack MS's crown jewel, the Office suite, in an attempt to squeeze out a few dollars more.

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hotstickyballs 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's why anything that goes against the long-established corporate culture aren't likely to stay around for long.

	▲	emodendroket 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Visual Studio Code has been around over a decade and there is zero indication it's going anywhere.

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shimman an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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nine_k a few seconds ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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gucci-on-fleek 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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watermelon0 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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jayceekay 9 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

They said cottage industry, not software industry.

Edit: s/he/they/woops sorry

	▲	emodendroket 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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).

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jijji 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think Microsoft stopped being the "darling" in 1994 when they got sued by Stacker and had to pay $120 million for stealing their source code and using it in their own product.

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userbinator 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

They're open-sourcing things either because they get no value from them anymore, or just want more unpaid "community" labour.

	▲	emodendroket 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		OK well that's the whole "open source" model. It's not some Microsoft perversion of it. The reason they moved from "free software" to "open source" was specifically rejecting the ideological stuff that would prevent business exploitation