Open tech, be afraid. Be very afraid. Microsoft owns both Visual Studio Code “VSCode” and MS-GitHub, two intertwined and utterly proprietary product-service ecosystems with a bit of open-source in their core to lure us in. Because they love open source? Yeah, no.
Soon after leaving GitPod whose technology links the two, Geoffrey Hunt last year explained their strategy and what it’s doing to our open tech world, in a great and “harrowing” article, “Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture” https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
“The future of software development tooling that is being built is closed as ****, and people seem to be okay with it…”
This is why MS-GitHub is not our friend.
This is why falling for their trick, disguising MS-VSCode as a neat “free” editor, will come back and haunt and hurt us.
Vendor lock-in double-whammy. Using open source as “a financial weapon”.“… the biggest challenge for Gitpod, GitLab, Datacoves, OpenBB, Foam, et al lies ahead - developing open language tooling for each community where Microsoft has forked the communities over to proprietary language servers…”
If we have a grain of public spirit, if we are motivated at all by the Freedom that’s supposed to be afforded by Free-Libre Open-Source Software, we must #GiveUpGithub, we must recognise the trap, we must choose truly open #FreedomTech.
See also my FOSS Apps Live in FOSS Forges .
@julian@fed.foad.me.uk I honestly don't get why anyone uses VSCode outside of work (when mandated, if given the choice then as usual...).
If you're not mandated to, isn't #Emacs much more comfortable? Plus, there's no unclean #proprietary garbage lurking around, closed to introspection and modification.
Anything that isn't #introspectable and #FreeSoftware shouldn't be perceived as anything more than a joke in particularly bad taste.
However, VSCodium can’t shut out all the data collection as it is the same codebase. And since extensions act independently with regard to data collection, you still need to be mindful of what extensions you install.
That's always been the case with basically everything though. One can make Elisp spyware and malware. It's one of the reasons non built-in dependencies should be carefully evaluated and ideally audited to at least some degree before using them.
Of course any dependency that does turn out to be malware should be called out as such and their authors considered at minimum deeply-suspect wherever they go.
Sure, sometimes Free Software isn't as refined, but the most important parts are user freedom and agency.
Candy sweetened with lead acetate might be tastier, but it will sicken you horribly and kill you. Even if it's tastier, don't eat it.The same is also true for customers of these competitive cloud development environments if they were to manually install these extensions into these platforms, the customers would be in breach as the license of these extensions is very clear that they are only licensed for installation in official builds distributed by Microsoft:
Blatant violation of Freedom 0, garbage.
That bit about Open Source as a financial weapon reminded me of this article.
@rysiek@mstdn.social @PiTau@mstdn.social They are a problem because people like RMS are why shit's stagnating and regressing!
He's a sexist POS and all he does is saying "why [insert anything] is bad" on his 1999 Homepage yet doesn't even bother to point to better alternatives (okay, paywalling toilets is just evil, just don't but that's not the point here)...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2SKenHRhMg
@kkarhan@mstdn.social @PiTau@mstdn.social @rysiek@mstdn.social He does actually point out some alternatives from time to time, though maybe he does that more often on Fedi than on his site, I haven't really been paying attention that closely.
Also, we've yet to even just catch back up with what Lisp Machines were doing 20~30 years ago in terms of system design. There has been a lot of unix-brained regression that needs to be addressed before blaming any other party.
(And Microsoft dropped the last hope for common & good sense to prevail in their ecosystem back in 2015 so that's the end of the line for them too.)
We're still writing new C code, despite knowing full well that's a terrible idea and having decades of easily-avoidable incident after incident to back that assertion. We've had perfectly viable alternatives for over two decades now, even in embedded spaces.
The entire mobile ecosystem has been nothing but an avoidable disaster made-up of bad decisions from the start.
The realization that the clearnet is fundamentally broken as anything but a routing layer isn't anything new either. I2P is 20 years old. And yet we still see new deployments on the clearnet and mass direct reliance on that transport layer despite knowing full-well its physical makeup has been purposely sabotaged to facilitate censorship and disruption whenever it's politically expedient in a lot of countries.
And right, disruption tolerance, that's something the internet, TCP stack and low-latency networking in general completely ignores (yeah unfortunately I2P also loses on that one). Any reasonable assessment of the infrastructural difficulties that are routinely observed on a daily basis around the world should be enough to conclude that medium-diverse/independent/agnostic Asynchronous Communication is a basic requirement and paradigm to build around, because infrastructure capable of lending itself to low-latency communication cannot be meaningfully assumed anywhere.
(By the way, neither Fidonet nor Usenet made such assumptions about infrastructure. We've regressed a lot.)
We've also had ample time to observe that centralized infrastructures are basically optimized for easy takedowns, and yet the majority of current systems are still neither distributed nor P2P.
So yeah, I don't know, I don't think all of that can be blamed on the FSF when there's a lot of corposcum and malicious government intervention that directly contributed to this state of affairs.
https://kitsunes.club/notes/9lggdehisj
@hayley@social.applied-langua.ge There are so many problems with that linked take it's amazing.
First and foremost the complete ignorance of the inherent problems and power dynamics any and all server-centric design involves.
It is fundamentally anti-egalitarian and cannot be anything else (hierarchy is quite literally baked-in as a core assumption).
Also I'd much rather have a cozy apartment in a panelka in a rail-connected town in Northern Canada, one of the few places where halfway decent weather (basically never >25C) still exists.
Older thinkpads are the least awful of a generally awful form-factor. Portable/luggable computers are unambiguously superior in practically all aspects.
You still need a smart client/terminal anyway to use a server, so what's the point instead of just having independent computers with properly-written P2P programs that are optimized for resilient computing in harsh conditions with minimal resources & infrastructural assumptions (https://mastodon.top/@lispi314/111253066257920146)?
LisPi
:blobancap: :blobcattrans: :blobancap: :blobcattrans: :blobancap: :blobcattrans:
