It is kind of a marketing tool for them to gather field research. The telemetry from VS Code gives Microsoft insights on trends and helps with product development. I guess that the philosophy is to make tools for devs, and create an “ecosystem” to sell something extra. It just goes to show how they purused similar stratgies in the long-run. Prior to being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub made their own open-source code editor too, Atom. on any page of a repository, it will open the web-based VS Code editor. You can see this integration with GitHub now, if you press. I guess if there is close integration of VS Code with other Microsoft products, it can be touted as a feature to hook people in. This is probably why the C# and C++ extensions for VS Code have restrictive licenses. It certainly hasn’t killed Visual Studio off as a paid product, Visual Studio is available in different editions and is part of a subscriptions offering. The pricing looks modest enough, but I’m sure they are starting to make some money from it by now.īecause some of the software related to VS Code is proprietary, there are commercial avenues Microsoft can explore in the future. Full details on pricing is available in their documentation. It was rolled out in August 2021 and is only available to GitHub Teams and GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers currently. GitHub (owned by Microsoft) has started a paid product called Codespaces, which uses VS Code in virtual machines (VMs). An ephemeral editor that is available to anyone with a browser and an internet connection is the foundation for a future where we can truly edit anything from anywhere. It is also the start of a completely new one. As a VS Code blog post said:īringing VS Code to the browser is the realization of the original vision for the product. Recently, VS Code has been released as a new online product, v, a code editor in the browser. More importantly, the community is building the majority of the the functionality for other languages and non-core features through extensions. They get voluntary contributions from the community to maintain and extend those features. VS Code is built as a lightweight editor, the core functionality is aimed at front-end development. And more generally, since good will is an actual line item on a company’s balance sheet, it is good for the value of the business to be more highly regarded. Now devs are probably more influential in purchasing their digital products and services than before. Their cloud computing business and dev-related offerings are making up a growing portion of their balance sheet. Now that their operating system is not the cash cow it once was, they have had to pivot. In 2020, Brad Smith, a Microsoft president, admitted “Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally”. In 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously branded Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”. In the olden days, Microsoft was a strong antagonist to open-source. It is good for the reputation of Microsoft to be seen as a player in open-source. It is not a simple question to answer really, and I am speculating here, but… There is more to it than that! It requires some unpacking! Before we dive into the specifics, it is probably worthwhile to understand why is a huge for-profit company giving away a high-quality product for free! Why is VS Code free? VS Codium is a fully open-source alternative based on the same codebase. It is a bit of a mongrel breed of software really. VS Code is a mostly open-source code editor, with proprietary sprinkles on top, and a proprietary extension marketplace.
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