sounds like M$'s real face : Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
A company that is known for doing shitty things does shitty things.
Color me fucking surprised.
Honestly, at this point, I have ZERO sympathy for people who are still actively using microsoft products and running into problems.
Yeah, they have already done this with other extensions like Python, this is not new behavior.
Honestly the biggest reason to stay away from VS CodeWhat are other free and good ide’s though?
Stallman was right, episode five billion.
https://open-vsx.org/extension/llvm-vs-code-extensions/vscode-clangd
Maybe not as feature complete but should be a good alternative
Just violate their rules and enable the microsoft extensions on forks
That’s just it, these extensions themselves refuse to run if the fork doesn’t say it is vs code. You’d have to build it yourself to report compliant information to the extension, or build the extension yourself to not check. Both of which are not trivial.
Not sure about the c/c++ support, but zed has greatly improved and it’s looking like a real long term alternative at this point
Does Theia have C/C++ extensions?
Maybe it’s just me, but I never got that thing to work right anyway - with VSC. It keeps running amok and using up all the CPU time doing stuff it should not be doing, trying to analyze every single file in my VM every single time it is started.
So… good riddance.
Maybe we need a new movement (or revisit past ideas from the 70s) that focuses on ensuring the openness regarding freedoms of computing (😉) that combat proprietary SaaS offerings? idk.
This is why OSS as an org needs a change IMO. Licenses like SSPLv1, where software can be supplied for free with options that allow a company to make money without risk of a cloud vendor snapping up their software (think Redis, MongoDB, etc) need a place at the table.
Licenses like SSPLv1
The SSPL requires that all software used to deploy SSPL software is open sourced. If I deploy my software on Windows, do I have to provide the source code for Windows? What about the proprietary hardware drivers, or Intel Management Engine?
The SSPL is not the next generation of licenses, it is effectively unusable. And both Redis and Mongo, dual licensed their software as the SSPL, and a proprietary license — effectively making their entire software proprietary.
make money without risk of a cloud vendor snapping up their software (think Redis, MongoDB, etc) need a place at the table.
Except Redis, and Mongo were making money. They had well valued, well earning SAAS offerings — it’s just that the offerings integrated into existing cloud vendors would be more popular (because vendor lock in). They just wanted more money, and were hoping that by going proprietary, they could force customers away from the cloud offers to themselves, and massively increase their revenue… They did not get that.
Another thing is that it’s not “stealing” Mongo/Redis’ when cloud vendors offer SAAS’s of Mongo/Redis. Mongo/Redis, and their SAAS offerings, are only possible because the same cloud vendors put more money than Mongo/Redis make yearly into Linux and other software that powers the SAAS offerings of Mongo/Redis, like Kubernetes. Without that software, Mongo/Redis wouldn’t have a SAAS offering at all.
I definitely think that it’s bad when a piece of software doesn’t get any funding it needs to develop, especially when it powers much more modern software, like XZ. But Mongo/Redis weren’t suffering from a lack of funding at all. They’re just mad they had to share their toys, and tried to take them away. But it didn’t even matter in the end.
They pulled the same thing with their widely used office format: base capabilities are standardised but most useful stuff is proprietary extension.
A few things to point out:
- Microsoft created this extension and pays money to develop it
- Despite that, they give it to programmers for free. It is still free of charge.
- They explicitly said that using it outside of their products is forbidden (according to article: at least 5 years ago), they just didn’t enforce it
- Someone (here: Cursor developers), despite that, used it in their products and started to make money from it
What exactly are you mad at? When will programming community finally understand that Microsoft is not a non-profit company and its primary purpose is to make money?
Because a .vscode still pollute most open source projects. It"s annoying that they get people hooked on it that could use better tools instead.
Better tools such as…?
Neovim plus tmux.
nvim
Don’t be upset it took people a long time to realize Visual Studio Code is fauxpen source, just be glad they’re finally realizing it. No need to be condescending and make people feel ashamed over it.
The problem is that they’re killing competition. Treating a company with the market dominance of Microsoft like a normal company would be fatal for humanity. Because they are eliminating innovation by Cursor and they do not need to do this to finance their own innovation. Effectively, humanity gets less innovation by Microsoft doing this.
The problem is that they’re killing competition.
So, they pay to develop a product, for themselves, explicitly says “it’s only for us, shoo shoo”, and when they decide that their product, that they pay for, and provide for free to their user, should not be used by other, it kills the competition that did not do anything except take the product for free despite being told not to?
I’m not on the side of Microsoft for most things. But if doing nothing but taking someone else’s free product qualifies to be competition that should be protected, we’re having problems.
You’re looking at it in isolation, I’m looking at it in terms of this being Microsoft, a company which has held humanity back for most of its existence, now retracting something where they did a decent thing for once.
But Microsoft developed it in the first place. It’s perfectly within their rights to pull it and developers making money off of their work isn’t bad either. I love a good pitchfork to corporate, but this is honestly fine.
Well; companies used to get anti-trust laser canon’ed from orbit for less; but good luck with that in modern America
I wholeheartedly agree that monopolistic practices should be nuked instantly, but I disagree that this was ever well enforced. Microsoft got away with murder in the 90’s before they went to court and even then, feels like they got a slap on the wrist…
I think that this particular case is very far from that, but it does start to smell the same.
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ Because pretending your editor is open source while moving all the important functionality to proprietary plugins is a bait and switch.
Embrace.
Extend.
Extinguish. Extract rent now that everyone lives in / depends on your proprietary ecosystem.I’d say they can’t keep getting away with it!, but history shows they clearly can.
Literally monopolist strategy 101.
This was all people were talking about when they bought GitHub. We’ve past the “Extend” stage now.
One that’s worked for Microsoft many times before (docx, for example). Its their favorite loophole.
It’s also blocked in VSCodium whose developers are not making money off it.
So that’s not a nice thing.
At least VSCodium cares about software licenses, (see it works both ways)
That Cursor (an AI focused) fork doesn’t shouldn’t be very shocking.
Plus you can always just use clangd. Its what I’ve always used with every text editor that has LSP support.
Honestly moving to clangd has got to be the single best thing I’ve done in C++, it’s cross platform and I’ve found it to be significantly faster, more reliable, and more featureful than Microsoft’s C++ plugin by a long shot
I havent used vscode in while but I do remember having a lot of issues with the Microsoft C++ plugin, especially in large projects. I switched to clangd very quickly.
Clang is a better C++ compiler than msvc, it generates faster binaries and can compile complex code that msvc errs on at least in my experience YMMV.
I wish there was a GCC equivalent; but even if clang is a corpowhore project it’s atleast OSS
Another reason to hate LLMs on the list.
Good opportunity for Jetbrains to jump in. Maybe if they MIT licensed their community-edition tools.
i’ve been on the zed wagon for months
Jetbrains have gone the opposite direction unfortunately. The latest version of PyCharm came with the announcement that PyCharm Community is being discontinued. Instead, they will provide just one PyCharm (the closed source one) formerly PyCharm Professional, that can operated in a Basic (Free) mode, or a Pro (Licenced) mode. Also, some features that were free in Community edition will be moved to the Pro mode in the new PyCharm.
It doesn’t affect me personally because my workplace pays for a pro subscription for me, but I used PyCharm Community for 4 years during uni and I’m sad it’s going.
Not sure if you read this blog post: https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2025/04/unified-pycharm/
Rest assured – our commitment to open-source development remains as strong as ever. The Community Edition codebase will stay public on GitHub, and we’ll continue to maintain and update it. We’ll also provide an easy way to build PyCharm from source via GitHub Actions.
PyCharm is - like all JetBrains IDEs - based on intellij-community and the “Pro” stuff just some fancy pre-installed plugin that requires a license.
Alternatively, you may choose to manually switch to the new PyCharm immediately and keep using everything you have now for free, plus the support for Jupyter notebooks.
So all community functionallities will also be available in the unified edition for free.
Also the Pro license - which you can also get 4 free in like 10 different ways - pricing is extremely fair: A license costs $100-60 for an individual, which is cheaper than most streaming subscriptions…
Just came across another option. For those getting blocked by MSFT: https://theia-ide.org/
University students get free pro licenses for jetbrains IDEs I think
Yes you’re right, they do. But 10 years ago when I was studying, my university (in Australia) was not on their list of valid academic institutions.
I still have access to my uni email address, and earlier this year I found indeed I could use it to get access to a free Jetbrains student licence.
Does Nano and GCC still work ok?
Only if you are desperate or masochistic.
I would never use nano because vim is right there
Oh, Microsoft is pulling the rug under your feet?
That’s fuckin’ news right there!
Here we go!!! I was expecting the enshitification of this thing for past couple of years
It was explicitly said to not use this outside of VSCode, so, I’m not sure where the surprise comes from.
You are late. They have already did the same with C# extension, and made it closed source too.
I’m not up-to-date: what did they do to the C# extension? I’ve been using it on a personal project and haven’t experienced anything egregiously terrible (yet)
A lot of the C# ecosystem is open source (thank goodness), but the official debugger isn’t, hence it only being available in the proprietary version of VSCode.
They did it with python about 2 years ago.
