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0 pointschipotle_coyote3y ago0 comments

I know that perception of Microsoft will never go away in the open source community, and maybe it shouldn’t, although I’m not convinced Microsoft of 2022 is particularly worse (or particularly better) than most other companies operating simultaneously in open source and proprietary spaces.

The context of “embrace, extend and extinguish” has kind of been diffused over the years, though; it never meant “buy a product and kill it,” but rather meant adopting open standards and adding proprietary (not necessarily closed, which is not the same thing) extensions to them that end up becoming de facto standards, so your product is perceived as better at the task then the fully standards-compliant original. What happened with Visual Studio Code and Atom isn’t an example of this at all. For a start, they’re just two products that are competing in the same space; they’ve never had the same extension standards, so the idea of “embracing and extending” just isn’t relevant here.

Secondly, Microsoft obviously didn’t buy GitHub to shut Atom down. I’ve seen the arguments that once Microsoft did buy GitHub, Atom was doomed, but Code was already arguably more popular than Atom when Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018: Stack Overflow’s developer survey showed VSCode as far more popular among surveyed users (34.9% to Atom’s 18.9%). If those numbers had been reversed—if Code never made a real dent and Atom kept growing—then I have little doubt Atom would be the one continuing.

Lastly, I suspect the runaway popularity of Visual Studio Code is pretty good insurance against a hypothetical “Visual Studio Code Pro” replacing the existing VS Code. This would almost certainly cause a fork (or more than one!) to be created, and it’s highly likely such a fork would get immediate backing and support from one or more technology companies willing to pay for continued open source development.

However, I don’t think that’s likely, because I don’t think that’s how Microsoft is interested in monetizing Code. It’s not a source of income in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be. If it just so happens to have great GitHub integration, maybe your company will pay for GitHub enterprise features. If you’re used to using it, you may be more likely to pay for GitHub Codespaces. If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure. And so on.

0 comments

ahkurtz3y ago

No, they didn't buy GitHub to shut Atom down. But they did create VSCode to cut off GitHub's growing expansion of their business through Atom. They could have just extended Atom with Azure plugins etc, but instead they essentially forked it and poured tons of resources and hundreds of developers into it. That effort helped suppress the valuation of GitHub, so that they could buy it for cheaper (or at all?).

The revenue generating upsell for VSCode is already here and it IS GitHub Codespaces. They are going to add features you can't live without based off code synthesis (sky's really the limit here) and gate those off saying it can't run locally because it's too resource intensive. They'll charge you (or your company) by the second for all usage.

It would be much harder or impossible for them to do this if Atom and an independent GitHub had been further entrenching in this space for the last decade.

Many of the biggest developer tooling projects big corp are building now existentially threaten smaller developers and apps, by design.

Don't give Microsoft a pass here.

yladiz3y ago

I'd be willing to bet that even if Microsoft did create VSCode for the purposes of cutting Github's expansion, the effect that VSCode had on Github's valuation is extremely overstated here. The total valuation comes from a range of factors, but let's say there are two major ones: number of users and number of paying organizations. The latter is almost completely not dependent on Atom (companies would not use Atom as a deciding factor to use Github) and while some users might use Github because they used Atom first, I don't think that this is large enough that the migration from Atom to VSCode negatively impacted the valuation.

I think a simpler explanation is correct: Microsoft saw that open source developer tools are gaining a lot of popularity and also knew that it could help revitalize/modernize their image, so they authorized the funding for the creation of a (mostly) open source code editor, and it gained popularity because it was good.

jimnotgym3y ago

> If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure

This. Microsoft share price depends on the size of their recurring revenue from cloud. They can easily write off a few million on VScode for bringing more users to Azure

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