Why are we acting like VS Code is nothing but a way to stop independent developers from selling their tools? Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry 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 and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for several decades and if luck we with us indefinitely.
Have releases of other open-source tools destroyed cottage industries? Certainly they have, to an extent.
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.
I started migrating away for VSCode, piece by piece.
But if you need it:
Theia/Positron/VSCodium
For Python/Julia? Many alternatives. For C family? Similar Java/Go? Similar.
> Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades.
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.