I get worried that VS Code is too popular, and that some higher ups might be tempted to go for an EEE play.
The flipside is that MS pouring money into VS Code has tremendously benefited the entire code editor ecosystem, including (especially) FOSS editors that can reuse their language servers.
> This is why MIT isn't always the correct choice. GPL wouldn't hurt devs at all and would protect from this kind of garbage from MS.
But would it protect against Pylance existing, or would it just be more expensive to develop but still proprietary (and possibly not free-as-in-beer), or would it be Free?
There's only one of those three where devs (as opposed to Free Software ideologues) win, and one where both lose.
(And really, it would do none of those, since pyright is also owned by MS, so they could reuse it on any terms even if the owner [them] offered it to others only under GPL terms. All GPL would do is prevent someone else from competing with Pylance by taking pyright and building similar functionality on top, possibly with a still-Free license.)
If pyright were GPL'd then MS would own their own pieces, but the contributions would be owned by others and that would prevent the relicensing you're talking aobut.
MS could pay a dev team to write everything themselves, but it's a matter of cost. Given the choice between paying for a ground-up development for a tiny gain or using the open project, inertia would push toward the open project.
Finally, there's the question of trust.
Why does MS feel the need to lock these things down?
It's obvious now that "Open" was a hook. It killed off all the competitors like Atom or Brackets and even mostly killed off other editors like Sublime. The only question now is the final goal of their lock-in. The only real observation is that all of "the new MS that loves devs" was just more of the classic Microsoft we've known for decades.
> It's obvious now that "Open" was a hook. It killed off all the competitors like Atom or Brackets and even mostly killed off other editors like Sublime. The only question now is the final goal of their lock-in. The only real observation is that all of "the new MS that loves devs" was just more of the classic Microsoft we've known for decades.
There's never a question of Microsoft's goal. It is always to destroy your choice to use non-Microsoft products. They pour resources into a "free" product that I will admit is good. It has to be, to kill all competing products over many years. Then when there is no reasonable competing product, they switch it to a paid product.
I can remember when Windows 3.1 was released. I did development on it at Ford, to emulate a vector graphics terminal. I remember when Office was bundled with Windows for free; now it is 1/3 of their revenue. I have seen Microsoft repeat this game over and over. History truly does repeat itself.
> If pyright were GPL'd then MS would own their own pieces, but the contributions would be owned by others
So in your hypothetical, Microsoft not only uses the GPL instead of MIT outbound, but accepts contributions under the GPL instead of the CLA it uses for most MS open source project contributions, including pyright, inbound, etc.?
If they asked for people to sign over copyright for all contributions, they simply wouldn't get many takers because it would be transparent that the only reason to ask would be to close the source later.
> If they asked for people to sign over copyright for all contributions, they simply wouldn't get many takers because it would be transparent that the only reason to ask would be to close the source later.
How is that any less true when the outbound license is MIT, and, therefore, how is the fact that they get contributions with the CLA now not a firm disproof of that claim?
I wish this point was brought up more often. Like in the TiVo case when everyone lost their minds about ideology, meanwhile millions of people got to watch what they wanted on their schedule and with no ads.
This attitude of MIT being bad because it gives people freedom to do Bad Things™ really makes me question what open source is actually about (yes I know that it's complicated and means many things, that's not what I'm talking about here). It seems to me that some proponents of it really believe in it so they can tell other people what to do.
In this case both Pylance and Pyright are developed by Microsoft.
I suspect that open-sourcing in anything at all is essentially a long-term PR/marketing/recruiting investment, as well as as positioning Microsoft as the keepers and main developers of what has become an important standard.
That said, by "reuse" I mean that end-users are free to install the non-free binaries extracted from VS code, which interoperate with any text editor that implement a language client. They are all on NPM.
The flipside is that MS pouring money into VS Code has tremendously benefited the entire code editor ecosystem, including (especially) FOSS editors that can reuse their language servers.