They are supporting open source, no? Could depend on your definition of course, but still.. Anyway: the tricky point here is that the division/department/whatever which deals with that is not the same one as the management (or whatever group) pushing for these advertisements. To the point that treating Microsoft as one big untrustable entity and putting a dollar sign in its name becomes a bit weird and overly generalistic. I mean, I don't 'trust' any company they way I'd trust true friends, but dismissing the whole of it seems far fetched. E.g. I use their compiler. Do I have to worry about the compiler betraying trust somehow because some completely unrelated team in a large company pulls of stupid advertising? It's possible of course the complete top layer of management is instructing every single piece below it to do evil, like the compiler team putting backdoors in, but I don't think there are signs of such things going on.
Yes, definitely they are. But with strings attached, in the form of WSL.
I'm patiently waiting for the day when they will announce that some big software/service from them (Office? GUI? Outlook?) will be finally integrated into Linux, but sadly it has to be WSL to work properly/faster/better/with support, that is, Windows, and not the real thing.
The next big Linux distribution, the one that every business will take as the standard to make their products (and drivers!) compatible will carry the Microsoft brand. Microsoft attempted to kill Linux in the past, and failed spectacularly, so they're now aiming at controlling it by becoming a Linux vendor, possibly the biggest one.
What makes you think the VSCode team has enough autonomy that this kind of crap won't leak in when some enterprising product manager sees a ripe user-base available to exploit to improve their KPI's?
Also VSCode is already set up to enable this type of garbage. The "recommended extensions" popup is a great vector for getting programmers to use the tools MS decides are best for them, and the features for working on remote codebases are great for blurring the lines between a codebase that you actually control, and toolchains which depend on an Azure server somewhere in the middle.
Because the nature of the base product being open source is that the VSCodium devs can patch out any sufficiently bad behaviour, and the risk of this becoming a fork should serve to discourage this behaviour in the first place.
But there’s open source and there’s open source right? I mean theoretically anyone can fork Android, but Google has created a lot of hurdles for actually making one a success.
I think there’s always a risk that a product like this can be set up in such a way that OSS is used mainly as an advertising feature, and essential features can be gradually moved from the open source section to proprietary code.
All I’m saying is that open source is not a panacea, and there are plenty of ways for large well resourced entities to abuse it
I don’t think this is really related. Google supports open source & they do basically the same sort of stuff. Open source at this point is just common sense. It’s more profitable than a fully proprietary model in many cases.
In the cases where you aren’t necessarily trying to profit from it directly but rather provide a platform that ultimately makes you more money. Or really for any case where you aren’t selling the software, because you’re able to reduce the cost of development and maintenance.
What do you mean exactly? Do you mean when offering a service built on open source software, which is developed by some 3rd party groups/communities/organizations?
.NET Core is a great example. Microsoft directly benefits from gaining market share among developers — it helps them sell Azure, etc. Open sourcing it was absolutely necessary to remain competitive. They did it because it’s the right business decision.
