I can be counted as one of the skeptics of MS's open-source efforts. It just seems to me that MS's history and recent investment in open-source puts us in a quantum state between two possibilities:
1. MS has changed their ways, and has become an altruist organization which just wants to give developers things of value for free so they might hopefully choose Azure when they decide what cloud provider to run on.
2. MS is embedding themselves in the open-source community in such a way that it's almost unavoidable to make use of their proprietary tools without even realizing it, and they will use that to their advantage against competitors and developers.
It's just hard for me to think that the second possibility won't become increasingly true to the extent that MS gains the leverage to get away with it.
As a side-note, I think MS's marketing for VSCode has been very effective. As an editor, I don't see an advantage over ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ ฬถ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ less corporate alternatives like SublimeText, and I actually don't like the "install this plugin" spam in the bottom right corner.
As far as I'm aware of, Microsoft is not even trying to put their own services forward. For example neither Github nor Azure are the defaults in VSCode. Go to the source control section and use what ever source control tool you want, VSCode does not even suggest you use Github. They also don't bundle extensions like LiveShare with VSCode, by including it into the VSCode installer they distribute on their own website.
This is why I disagree with your claim that Microsoft is giving away VSCode away for free to promote their own proprietary tools. You can shame Microsoft for trying to improve their image by making VSCode, Typescript, ... opensource. To me this is totally different from bundling your own Browser into an operating system to increase artificially your market share, you can't compare the two.
There is nothing bad about not blindly trusting a big corporation like Microsoft, but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past, that they write articles that are (deliberately?) misleading. In this case, by saying parts of VSCode are opensource when it is just some extensions. This is putting VSCode on a pedestal with Chrome, but the comparaison is all wrong, Chrome includes lots of proprietary parts, while chromium is the opensource variant you can build yourself, but for VSCode this is completely different as the version distributed on the Microsoft website doesn't include anything besides the opensource code from Github repository.
> but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past
I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations and feel bad for/protective of them.
And let's be honest, we're not talking about "mistakes", we're talking about a decades-long strategy which was methodically executed to cultivate good will, and then take advantage of it to destroy competitors.
Conversely, I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations as if they have personalities and traits that somehow live beyond an almost 100% turnover in staff and senior management changes.
The MS of today isnโt the MS of the 90s. Thatโs not to say theyโre virtuous and wonderful today, just that banging on about the past doesnโt really feel relevant.
So, I just checked https://news.microsoft.com/leadership/.
The vast majority of the people there joined Microsoft in the 80s or 90s. Two or three in the early 2000, and one after 2010. For one person it was unclear when they joined.
So, an overwhelming majority of the senior management were perfectly happy to work for the "MS of the 90s". Therefore, it's hard to see that they'd be particularly uncomfortable with the ethics of the "MS of the 90s".
> I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations as if they have personalities and traits that somehow live beyond an almost 100% turnover in staff and senior management changes.
Companies definitely have personalities and traits that last longer than their constituent members, that's what's called a culture. Just like a nation has defining features that will still be around when every single currently living member is dead, so have companies. In particular old, large ones.
That's not to say that they can't change, and Microsoft definitely has changed since the 90s, but the past is not irrelevant.
I've observed that people in my environment that used to not like Microsoft still don't today while they are completely oblivious to the conduct of Google, Facebook or Amazon at the same time.
I see it as reminder to frequently check whether my opinions on different things are still valid.
I would say that it can be both. Large organizations like Microsoft have so many different people and teams that there isn't necessarily a group-think. On the contrary, different teams will have different priorities, and keeping people aligned is a really hard job.
The thing that bothers me about Visual Studio Code is that does conform to the general Microsoft rule of enabling telemetry by default. IMO, this is not good practice, and in some cases it seems to have been encouraged or mandated at a senior level. We should not have aggressive data collection in the world's standard desktop OS, or compilers baking vendor instrumentation into C++ binaries by default.
I used to be quite hardline on this matter myself, but I found the julialang [1] discussion on this topic quite a persuasive argument in favour of default telemetry.
I think it's a difficult ethical question, because there are balancing concerns and interests, and most behaviour doesn't easily fall into the obviously wrong or obviously right categories.
There is a difference between, say, Debian popcon (which is opt in during install) and the 50 MSFT tracking options that are enabled despite having ticked the "no" box during install.
One of which is a keylogger! Windows 10 is pure evil.
"As part of inking and typing on your device, Windows collects unique wordsโlike names you writeโin a personal dictionary stored locally on your device, which helps you type and ink more accurately.
If you sync your Windows device settings to other Windows devices, your local user dictionary (up to 100 KB per language and 300 KB total of hard drive space) will be stored on your personal OneDrive for the purpose of enabling sharing of your dictionary with your other Windows devices. "
And it may have been worse when Windows 10 was first released:
It doesn't. It creates statistics on how you type and what words you use in order to predict your input in order to help you in the future by predicting words you'll use before you type them.
It also doesn't do this for password/passphrase fields.
You can also turn it off, and you're prompted to do so upon OS installation, and the option is always there in the settings application, and you can even tell Microsoft to delete any telemetry it has for you, if you want, and they'll delete it.
Those are the facts. But, it's common to ignore those and just shout "keylogger" in online forums. It is also, somehow, a sign of weakness if you look for updated or changed information which may change your opinions, because no one ever seems to do this. Like, ever.
I would argue that it's not about intent. The most reliable way to predict the behavior of a corporation is to expect them to take the action which will optimally help their bottom line.
So for instance, the team building VSCode might be the most altruistic FOSS diehards on the planet, but that doesn't matter if the people managing them see an opportunity to leverage their work to profit MS at the expense of developers.
I think it's 3. MS realized that it's not as powerful as it was in the 80s and 90s because Apple and Google took over a huge portion of the computing market with mobile. So they have "changed their ways," not because of any altruism but because they have to change their ways to compete from a position that, while enviably strong, is also a laggard especially on the consumer and developer side of the business.
The problem with that is because if the only reason they changed their ways is because they lost the competitive advantage, what confidence should you have that they won't change back if they regain market-share?
It doesn't make me feel great about them owning the platform where almost all open source software is hosted, and one of the most dominant tools for writing code.
It's a company, in one of the most cutthroat industries in the world. Of course they do everything for competitive advantage, that's the same for all of them. Do you honestly think Amazon or Google are any different in this regard?
Microsoft's embrace of open source is about making their PaaS offerings universally compatible, and about trying to meet developers where they are. They will continue this strategy as long as it remains super profitable; ie as long as great developers have a preference for OSS, and as long as OSS remains a key part of the software ecosystem. If you want Microsoft to remain open source friendly, those are your battlefields.
I certainly don't think Amazon or Google are any different, but I'm not using their code editors, and I'm not hosting my open source projects on their platform.
It's not about MS being worse than the other tech giants, it's about opting out of these kinds of tools in favor of more open, less corporate controlled tools in general.
All companies become more sociopathic as they become more powerful. Look at Google's "Don't Be Evil" which went from inspirational, to corny, to sickening. The solution here isn't to try to support companies that won't do this (they all will, eventually)... it's to regulate how powerful they can get.
> MS is embedding themselves in the open-source community in such a way that it's almost unavoidable to make use of their proprietary tools without even realizing it
Try removing the word "proprietary" from that strategy, and see if it still fits the evidence you see. Or replace it with "paid".
Look at their earnings reports (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q4...). Licensing proprietary software is a small and shrinking piece of the pie, they don't even segment that way anymore in fiscal reports. They are (successfully) pivoting to become the Enterprise cloud service provider, and tightly integrated tools are an important part of that picture. Licenses simply aren't. So it's not "commercial office365", it's "commercial office365 and cloud", because o365 has tightly integrated Azure services and the revenue is tracked together. Which parts are OSS licensed is irrelevant, because that's not a primary revenue driver anymore.
A good example is the fastest growing service on Azure, AKS. 100% open source, even the implementation down to bare metal. They don't care about keeping it proprietary, because they make the same money with it either way.
Let's imagine that a few years from now, MS starts advertising Azure right inside VSCode, and they start releasing features which favor Azure integration, and actually cause problems when working with GCP.
Now imagine I as a developer want to pick up shop and move to another editor, but it turns out my workflow depends on proprietary extensions which are only available on VSCode, and my velocity will be cut by 70% if I switch editors.
If MS owns the interface most developers have to their code, there are all kinds of ways they could leverage that to your disadvantage.
In this scenario would you be relying on a proprietary extension to interact with GCP developed by Microsoft? Surely you would want to use a Google or Third-party developed extension to do that right? And in that case the developer of that extension would have a vested interest in making it available to you again, potentially in a forked version of VS Code. As long as the editor is open source extension developers can just fork it and create a new public directory of extensions. The only thing you potentially lose is Microsoft's proprietary extensions which are likely to always work well with Microsoft products and you really shouldn't use them to interact with Microsoft's competitors.
1. MS has changed their ways, and has become an altruist organization which just wants to give developers things of value for free so they might hopefully choose Azure when they decide what cloud provider to run on.
2. MS is embedding themselves in the open-source community in such a way that it's almost unavoidable to make use of their proprietary tools without even realizing it, and they will use that to their advantage against competitors and developers.
It's just hard for me to think that the second possibility won't become increasingly true to the extent that MS gains the leverage to get away with it.
As a side-note, I think MS's marketing for VSCode has been very effective. As an editor, I don't see an advantage over ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ ฬถ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ๐ฬถ less corporate alternatives like SublimeText, and I actually don't like the "install this plugin" spam in the bottom right corner.