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canes123456 | 1 year ago

Is it even not available to competitors? Visual studio is open source. Didn't cusor fork it and is building it features directly into the fork? Not doing something like this would make Copilot at a disadvantage.

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sshine|1 year ago

> Visual studio is open source

Sort of. The core is, and the installable binaries with telemetry and properietary extensions are not.

The open source, telemetry-free version of VSCode is called VSCodium: https://vscodium.com/

> Didn't cusor fork it and is building it features directly into the fork?

Yes, in their recent interview with Lex Fridman they argued that life as an extension is too limiting.

The main reason we criticise Microsoft for doing this and not them is just their size and market dominance.

Why jump through hoops to make competitors better able to hotwire their own AI into VSCode, or hotwire Copilot into their own IDE, when it's easier to iterate fast and remain unpredictable?

falcor84|1 year ago

> Why jump through hoops to make competitors better able

Because that is the competitive philosophy that allowed VS Code win in this space. It fits with that great quote from Bill Gates: "A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it."

By having VS Code give a priority to another MS/GitHub product that they aren't willing to give competitors, they're diminishing VS Code's value as a platform, and encouraging competitors to build their own IDEs rather than building on top of it.

naikrovek|1 year ago

> The open source, telemetry-free version of VSCode is called VSCodium

The open source, telemetry-free version of VSCode is called VSCode. The VSCodium people simply build it for you and package it for you.

nar001|1 year ago

You're mistaken, Visual Studio Code is open source not Visual Studio, they're different

serial_dev|1 year ago

But Cursor had to fork, so as a developer wanting to use them, you need to give up VS Code and install a new code editor, and you can’t just install a plugin. Very few can maintain a fork and get enough people to use their fork. Also what happens if you have two products that needed a fork? You can’t use them both.

I don’t know if it’s legal or not, IANAL, but it feels definitely anti competitive.

gortok|1 year ago

> Visual studio is open source.

No it’s not. Visual Studio is a proprietary product and the latest version is Visual Studio 2022.

Visual Studio Code is open source, and it is about as close to Visual Studio as Lightning is to Lightning Bug.

peeters|1 year ago

Competitors compete in the same market. The market in this case is VS Code extensions, with the consumers in that market being the user base of VS Code, not the users of some fork of VS Code. You can't point your competitors to a different market and then reasonably claim to be open to competition.

lenkite|1 year ago

Many things like C# Dev Kit are closed source. M$ is slowly but surely moving to the extinguish phase in its takeover workflow.

neonsunset|1 year ago

Sigh.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891653

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41884187

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41809351

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41639205

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41384888

Now, I'm not a big fan of VS Code as of lately. I find the changes, that first broke Customize UI + MonkeyPatch extensions to make it look not completely shit on macOS, and now the change that broke APC too that replaced the first two, completely user-hostile and the PM response in GH issues to that very poor. But this specific lie about what is OSS and what isn't, and how it's used annoys me a lot. You are not helping with the problem.