Julian Foad@julian@fed.foad.me.uk
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 .
LisPi@lispi314@udongein.xyz
@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.