MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for several decades and if luck we with us indefinitely.
VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.
> MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company
I'm pretty sure that all of those (aside from Xbox) are profitable on their own, so I don't think that them becoming independent would kneecap them at all.
Edit: s/he/they/woops sorry
Why not? That’s 11 years, times (say) 5 potential independent editors or IDE that didn’t exist because of VSCode in that time is over 50 years worth of software innovation.
Would it be better if most tools you use were proprietary, built by cottage industries? I doubt it. Especially if we notice that cottage industries tend to consolidate, and the few remaining players are rarely very community-oriented.
If the VAT amounted to $10,000,000,000 of tax revenue annually (something that is quite easy to do against an industry that has several trillion dollar corporations) that is enough to 100,000 open source projects with $100,000 grants.
This would literally unleash to much economic value that would be truly controlled by the public.
That is the future I want to build towards, anything that gives people more power against corporations and in the software world that means funding open source.
I can't think of a single open source dev that wouldn't mind a $100,000 grant for the likely millions they provide in economic value.
But if you need it:
Theia/Positron/VSCodium
For Python/Julia? Many alternatives. For C family? Similar Java/Go? Similar.
