Microsoft knew they would never get significant market share unless they offered open source alternatives that let you circumvent the telemetry in the early days of VScode. Embrace. The acquisition of github was part of this strategy. They made an ecosystem that sucked a lot of plugin developer talent into their ecosystem. Extend. Now the market share is firmly in their grasp and competitors have become weaker. Extinguish.
show comments
bangaladore
To be clear, I'm don't like the Microsoft has a proprietary Marketplace, but a company openly violating the terms of use for their own profit is a bit much in my opinion.
> Cursor allegedly has been flouting Microsoft terms-of-service rules for some time now by setting up a reverse proxy to mask its network requests to the endpoints used by the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace. This allows Cursor users to install VS Code extensions from Microsoft's market. Other VS Code forks tend to point to Open VSX, an alternative extension marketplace.
show comments
yoyohello13
Look, if you willingly have any piece of your stack relying on Microsoft you have to be ready for the rug pull. They WILL fuck you, it's guaranteed.
show comments
rs186
The intellisense from clangd is much better and faster than the Microsoft C++ extension, if you can set up a compile_commands.json. Although debugging still relies on the Microsoft extension. Although I don't think it's going to be hard to create an extension just for debugging (if it does not already exist?)
show comments
kstrauser
And this is why I'm using Zed today. I'm deadly serious. I was a huge proponent of VSCode at first but I've soured on it, and now I don't want my workflow to depend on it in any way.
Awesome software, but I don't trust the upstream org further than I must.
show comments
electroly
I love Cursor deeply but choosing to be a VSCode fork instead of a VSCode extension was a fatal choice. In the long term I think they either have to retool as an extension or they will go out of business. You can only publicly flout Microsoft's licenses for so long while making a competitor to one of their AAA products.
show comments
pjmlp
People not using VSCode on purpose, based on forks, are surprised product owner isn't happy with their license violations.
It is like when the same folks act surprised, after Google does something to their Chrome and Android forks.
Don't want big tech sponsored products?
Pay open source developers, so that they can actually make a living of their work.
concerndc1tizen
Do you guys ever feel tired of 'sounding the alarm'?
I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.
How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".
Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
show comments
ryao
Am I the only person using tmux+vim+cscope+bash+gcc as a development environment? I do not see the need for these GUIs. I also can develop software from just about anywhere as I only need to SSH into a machine with these things (+git) installed. There are no hostile license terms either.
As an added bonus, this setup is excellent for pair programming. Just use voice chat via signal or anything else and have the other person connect to the same tmux session over SSH.
That said, if you must use a GUI based development environment, I know of people happily using netbeans. I am not sure why anyone would use Microsoft’s tools for this.
show comments
kentonv
The clangd extension is better anyway, and is open source.
The Microsoft C++ extension is not open source; not sure what people were expecting here.
show comments
chenzhekl
I don't like MS, either. BUT, let's be clear. No one is to obligated to work for free on OSS, not even big companies like MS. They have the right to constraint them to work on their own platforms. If you don't like it, you should fork the previous unconstrained versions or develop your own C/C++ add-on rather than complaining that MS stopped supporting your favorite extension.
show comments
Yizahi
Good to see some of these neural network people actually pay for their real infractions. Granted, this time it was a banal competitor action, but still nice. Just because a license isn't enforced, doesn't make it safe to violate.
elashri
At least I know one alternative that is on bar (even better according to some people) for the C++ MS extension. What I am worried more about is the Jupyter Notebook MS extensions. I cannot find a suitable alternative and sometimes I am not being able to use it on windsurf/VSCodium (manually installing vsix). I am surprised by that taking into consideration how Jupyter notebooks relevance in data science and ML.
grougnax
The Microsoft Intellisense is really bad compared to the open-source one clangd, anyway.
This is one of the reasons why I switched to CLion for C++ work, and the fact that VS Code and its derivatives was a pain to configure for C++.
I also use PHPStorm for web dev work and we use MS DevOps at work and that extension is unstable, causes IDE errors for me and I will not use MS products just for this one irksome bug. I prefer PHPStorm for my work, because working with PHP in VS Code has never been a great experience for me. I just want my tools to work, I fight with code, I don't want to fight with my tools as well.
show comments
trenchgun
Abandon VSCodium, Return to Emacs
auguzanellato
After Pylance, Liveshare, and remote development (which among the others also includes dev containers support) I’m not really that surprised.
AlienRobot
I don't understand the problem. It sounds like the C/C++ extension was proprietary. This sort of thing can always happen when you rely on proprietary software. Make an open source C/C++ extension and you wouldn't have this problem.
show comments
silverwind
Glad I'm using Sublime Text.
shmerl
FYI, neovim has LSP and DAP support, as well as a bunch of other editors.
show comments
extr
I use cursor primarily because of the great tab autocomplete model, but I've always thought it was a bit scummy they blatantly violate the VS Code licensing. Windsurf ships a special version of the pyright extension for this reason. Why doesn't cursor have to play by the rules too?
> Visual Studio Code (VS Code) no longer works with derivative products such as VS Codium [..]
They seem to have this backward. Visual Studio Code is a derivative product of VS Codium.
show comments
jonstewart
The hilarious part is that old fart C++ programmers (like me) have been the ones most leery of VS Code. Microsoft’s gonna Microsoft, ‘specially with compilers.
If you fork it and don't use VS Marketplace, it's only MIT. Or am I missing something?
show comments
hexo
Good. Now it's time to learn from this important lesson.
dismalaf
Why anyone uses anything from Microsoft is beyond me... It's always been clear that VSCode is a trojan horse for MS' EEE strategy. So just don't use MS stuff. Neovim is great, it has great C++ tools. What's the saying? Fool me once...
zb3
People on this site will never ever learn that if a company (especially a profitable one) invests into something and then gives it away for free, there must be some kind of strings attached.
alfiedotwtf
Imagine Debian banning Debian forks downloading from their repos…
If Microsoft are going to call VS Code “open source”, then the marketplace should not be selective on clients. If so, it’s not Open Source, it’s Sparkling Virtue Signalling!
show comments
DeepYogurt
lol
Ekaros
Is this big deal? Surely with help of AI tools you can implement these extensions in matter of days if not hours. And they will be better.
paxys
Shitty move (as expected from Microsoft) but I don't see the bigger issue. The beauty of open source is that you can always roll back to a version that did work. Of course continued developement and support from there on is your problem, but Microsoft never owed that to you anyways. Cursor, Codium and all the other VS Code forks have unlimited VC funding and are worth tens of billions of dollars combined. They can afford to contribute back to the ecosystem.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Microsoft knew they would never get significant market share unless they offered open source alternatives that let you circumvent the telemetry in the early days of VScode. Embrace. The acquisition of github was part of this strategy. They made an ecosystem that sucked a lot of plugin developer talent into their ecosystem. Extend. Now the market share is firmly in their grasp and competitors have become weaker. Extinguish.
To be clear, I'm don't like the Microsoft has a proprietary Marketplace, but a company openly violating the terms of use for their own profit is a bit much in my opinion.
> Cursor allegedly has been flouting Microsoft terms-of-service rules for some time now by setting up a reverse proxy to mask its network requests to the endpoints used by the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace. This allows Cursor users to install VS Code extensions from Microsoft's market. Other VS Code forks tend to point to Open VSX, an alternative extension marketplace.
Look, if you willingly have any piece of your stack relying on Microsoft you have to be ready for the rug pull. They WILL fuck you, it's guaranteed.
The intellisense from clangd is much better and faster than the Microsoft C++ extension, if you can set up a compile_commands.json. Although debugging still relies on the Microsoft extension. Although I don't think it's going to be hard to create an extension just for debugging (if it does not already exist?)
And this is why I'm using Zed today. I'm deadly serious. I was a huge proponent of VSCode at first but I've soured on it, and now I don't want my workflow to depend on it in any way.
Awesome software, but I don't trust the upstream org further than I must.
I love Cursor deeply but choosing to be a VSCode fork instead of a VSCode extension was a fatal choice. In the long term I think they either have to retool as an extension or they will go out of business. You can only publicly flout Microsoft's licenses for so long while making a competitor to one of their AAA products.
People not using VSCode on purpose, based on forks, are surprised product owner isn't happy with their license violations.
It is like when the same folks act surprised, after Google does something to their Chrome and Android forks.
Don't want big tech sponsored products?
Pay open source developers, so that they can actually make a living of their work.
Do you guys ever feel tired of 'sounding the alarm'?
I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.
How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".
Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
Am I the only person using tmux+vim+cscope+bash+gcc as a development environment? I do not see the need for these GUIs. I also can develop software from just about anywhere as I only need to SSH into a machine with these things (+git) installed. There are no hostile license terms either.
As an added bonus, this setup is excellent for pair programming. Just use voice chat via signal or anything else and have the other person connect to the same tmux session over SSH.
That said, if you must use a GUI based development environment, I know of people happily using netbeans. I am not sure why anyone would use Microsoft’s tools for this.
The clangd extension is better anyway, and is open source.
The Microsoft C++ extension is not open source; not sure what people were expecting here.
I don't like MS, either. BUT, let's be clear. No one is to obligated to work for free on OSS, not even big companies like MS. They have the right to constraint them to work on their own platforms. If you don't like it, you should fork the previous unconstrained versions or develop your own C/C++ add-on rather than complaining that MS stopped supporting your favorite extension.
Good to see some of these neural network people actually pay for their real infractions. Granted, this time it was a banal competitor action, but still nice. Just because a license isn't enforced, doesn't make it safe to violate.
At least I know one alternative that is on bar (even better according to some people) for the C++ MS extension. What I am worried more about is the Jupyter Notebook MS extensions. I cannot find a suitable alternative and sometimes I am not being able to use it on windsurf/VSCodium (manually installing vsix). I am surprised by that taking into consideration how Jupyter notebooks relevance in data science and ML.
The Microsoft Intellisense is really bad compared to the open-source one clangd, anyway.
This is just Microsoft being classic Microsoft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
This is one of the reasons why I switched to CLion for C++ work, and the fact that VS Code and its derivatives was a pain to configure for C++.
I also use PHPStorm for web dev work and we use MS DevOps at work and that extension is unstable, causes IDE errors for me and I will not use MS products just for this one irksome bug. I prefer PHPStorm for my work, because working with PHP in VS Code has never been a great experience for me. I just want my tools to work, I fight with code, I don't want to fight with my tools as well.
Abandon VSCodium, Return to Emacs
After Pylance, Liveshare, and remote development (which among the others also includes dev containers support) I’m not really that surprised.
I don't understand the problem. It sounds like the C/C++ extension was proprietary. This sort of thing can always happen when you rely on proprietary software. Make an open source C/C++ extension and you wouldn't have this problem.
Glad I'm using Sublime Text.
FYI, neovim has LSP and DAP support, as well as a bunch of other editors.
I use cursor primarily because of the great tab autocomplete model, but I've always thought it was a bit scummy they blatantly violate the VS Code licensing. Windsurf ships a special version of the pyright extension for this reason. Why doesn't cursor have to play by the rules too?
Didn’t this affect Windsurf also ?
Reminder: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
This was foreseen 3 years ago: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
> Visual Studio Code (VS Code) no longer works with derivative products such as VS Codium [..]
They seem to have this backward. Visual Studio Code is a derivative product of VS Codium.
The hilarious part is that old fart C++ programmers (like me) have been the ones most leery of VS Code. Microsoft’s gonna Microsoft, ‘specially with compilers.
How is it not open-source?
It's licensed under MIT + VS Marketplace Terms: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools?tab=License-1-o...
If you fork it and don't use VS Marketplace, it's only MIT. Or am I missing something?
Good. Now it's time to learn from this important lesson.
Why anyone uses anything from Microsoft is beyond me... It's always been clear that VSCode is a trojan horse for MS' EEE strategy. So just don't use MS stuff. Neovim is great, it has great C++ tools. What's the saying? Fool me once...
People on this site will never ever learn that if a company (especially a profitable one) invests into something and then gives it away for free, there must be some kind of strings attached.
Imagine Debian banning Debian forks downloading from their repos…
If Microsoft are going to call VS Code “open source”, then the marketplace should not be selective on clients. If so, it’s not Open Source, it’s Sparkling Virtue Signalling!
lol
Is this big deal? Surely with help of AI tools you can implement these extensions in matter of days if not hours. And they will be better.
Shitty move (as expected from Microsoft) but I don't see the bigger issue. The beauty of open source is that you can always roll back to a version that did work. Of course continued developement and support from there on is your problem, but Microsoft never owed that to you anyways. Cursor, Codium and all the other VS Code forks have unlimited VC funding and are worth tens of billions of dollars combined. They can afford to contribute back to the ecosystem.