this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Yeah why the fuck is that? VSCode has no business being as good as it is. It's developed by Microsoft, after all. Are they planning to take it away from us and charge money for it in a few years? Why does it work on Linux so easily? Is it a government conspiracy to fill our brains with subliminal messages somehow? Wtf is the catch?
My best educated guess is that's it's a ploy of some kind. If Microsoft makes a free code editor that's really good, maybe no one will make a free open source one that's as good so that they will have control over the 1 most viable code editor? There are other things similar to VSCode but they cost money and are too big a pain to pirate because VSCode is better than them anyway.
It's not only VSCode, it's also Github and C# and TypeScript to a lesser extent as well, probably. They want to have control over the "coding" ecosystem. And look at what they already did with github, they trained AI on all projects on it, and they then sell access to that AI.
Github Copilot is worth the money. I've had it finish out functions for me after just a few lines. There's usually an error or two, but the consistency with which it can predict what I'm doing or trying to do is pretty impressive.
Copilot was trained on copylefted code while itself being closed. What was brought to attention by @[email protected] isn't efficacy, but Microsoft's lack of ethics and social responsibility when it comes to their bottom line.
I honestly don't have a problem with that. Everything that it was trained on is publicly-available/open-source code, and I'm not aware of any license that requires you to distribute your modifications if you don't make modified binaries publicly available, not even GPL. And even then, you're only required to make available the code that was modified, not related code. And I don't even think that situation would apply in this case, since nothing was modified, it was just ingested as training data. Copilot read a book, it didn't steal a book from the library and sell it with its name pasted over the original author's.
This isn't really any different of a situation than a closed-source Android app using openssl or libcurl or whatever. Just because those open-source libraries were employed in the making of the app doesn't mean that the developer must release the source for that app, and it doesn't make them a bad person for trying to make money from selling that app. Even Stallman is on board with selling software.
And even if you take all that off the table, you're free to do the exact same thing and make a competitor. Microsoft didn't make their own language model, they're using a commercially-available model developed by OpenAI. There's literally nothing stopping anyone else from doing this as well and making a competing service called "Programming Pal" and making their code open-source. In fact, it's already been done with FauxPilot and CodeGeex and the like.
So yeah, I really don't have a problem with it. This ended up a lot longer than I had originally thought it would, sorry for the novel.
I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here when people more invested in the topic than myself, including the Software Freedom Conservancy, have written detailed papers showcasing different perspectives on the legal and moral implications of Copilot and its business model. There's also currently a class-action lawsuit against GitHub for the service.
Yep. I'm not making a proclamation, just stating an opinion. I don't have a problem with what they're doing, and if other people do, that's fine. Some people like their cucumbers pickled, let them have their pickle.
I actually wouldn't be surprised to see it go open source in the future, Microsoft has been doing that a lot recently, like VScode and the whole of .NET and friends like PowerShell. Pretty much the only things worthwhile from Microsoft are already open source, except Copilot.
How can we use C# in a responsible and FOSS way? A huge advantage of C# is that it can't run into include order problems like C++ can. This makes it easier to make better object oriented games because the object structure can be more useful and you can get better results even if your object structure planning wasn't as well thought-out.
Here might lie the answer to your question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish
https://codeium.com/blog/why-did-microsoft-build-vscode-github-copilot
They learned their lesson with the old Visual Studio. Spending all of that money to maintain an IDE where the core 90% of it was no better than any open source or shareware alternative.
The only reasons people needed VS specifically were all features that could easily be turned into self-contained plugins.
And with everything turning into cloud services, there’s pretty much no point in trying to sell installable local apps that are impossible to fully DRM and have no justifiable subscription fees.
And when an enterprise goes to pick a cloud repo service, cloud code workspace, cloud hosting, devops system, AI development assistant, etc… Who are they gonna pick? Maybe the one from the same company that makes “that one app all our devs rave about”?