Even if Microsoft is hoping to kill competitors, I don’t see how it’s a problem. If people stop using their competitors because VSCode is just as good, then people are using a program that is just as good, for free. That’s a better state of affairs.
Perhaps you’re imagining that at some point Microsoft will stop developing VSCode because it has served its purpose, leaving people with no options. In that situation, people can still use the software for free for a while, until the code rots enough that it won’t run. Possibly by then, volunteers in the open-source community will have started maintaining it. Even if there aren’t enough volunteers to maintain VSCode for free, anyone (such as JetBrains) could start a company that maintains their own fork of VSCode (which they can do because it’s open-source) and charges users to use it. In that case, we are no worse off than before VSCode was introduced; we just had a few years where the popular IDE was temporarily free.
We had that with Google basically killing the RSS reader market, and it looks painfully hard to have it back to anything relevant, so this is a pretty bad scenario.
Now I don’t think VSCode will kill its competitor, it’s not that good IMO.
I don’t know that much about the history of RSS clients, but I’m not sure that Google Reader’s shutdown is comparable to VSCode’s future abandonment in terms of its effects on the market. The crucial difference is that Google Reader was not open source. Maybe if Google Reader had been open source, someone would have kept a fork of it running. I don’t know in what way the RSS reader market was “killed” or why that happened, though, so I can’t say for sure that such a fork would have prevented the market from being killed.
I agree that VSCode is not yet good enough to kill off competitors like JetBrains, so there is little need to worry either way.
I am not worried about microsoft stopping developing it, i am worried about microsoft putting companies out of business using free products, which they then use to cross sell their closed source ides and as a marketing tool. If they are so open source friendly why dont they open source their visual studio, or windows, at least the older eol versions - so we can learn something out of their code, as per open source’s principles?
That’s right. Because they don’t care. They want a marketing product, dumped and aimed at commercial ide developers. VSCode is a free product, with the source code made available and developed by people for free, and for the benefit of microsoft.
I am not worried about microsoft stopping developing it, i am worried about microsoft putting companies out of business using free products, which they then use to cross sell their closed source ides and as a marketing tool.
So would you be opposed to participating in a free forum that is used as a marketing tool by a venture capitalist?
Perhaps you’re imagining that at some point Microsoft will stop developing VSCode because it has served its purpose, leaving people with no options. In that situation, people can still use the software for free for a while, until the code rots enough that it won’t run. Possibly by then, volunteers in the open-source community will have started maintaining it. Even if there aren’t enough volunteers to maintain VSCode for free, anyone (such as JetBrains) could start a company that maintains their own fork of VSCode (which they can do because it’s open-source) and charges users to use it. In that case, we are no worse off than before VSCode was introduced; we just had a few years where the popular IDE was temporarily free.