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.
@julian And, unfortunately, as someone who requires accessibility I don't have a choice. VSCode is the only real accessible IDE on Windows. GitHub is the only actually accessible code hosting service. VSCode has given us blind programmers something we never had before. No IDE worked for us before, except maybe emacs for some people. Visual studio maybe, but nothing FOSS. Never FOSS. FOSS and accessibility do not match, in the end. Individuals work on it, the ideal is there, and they really, really try. But when the culture requires you to implement it yourself and those who need it the most can't be the ones to implement it...
Add comment