The funny thing is that I’ll never understand why it’s not open source and why its license prohibits its use in VSCodium. Pylance is good, but not that good. Certainly not on a level of PyCharm. What incentive do they have to keep it secret except being evil?
VSCode is build to sell Azure and other Microsoft services, which they won’t if you use VSCodium. To a lot of people this will probably be less obvious than it is to anyone working in a Microsoft heavy enterprise organisation. The VSCode extensions integrate incredibly well with the Microsoft infrastructure you already have when you’re tied into Azure and the Microsoft AI services. It also ties in rather well with both Azure DevOps and GitHub, which are other services you’re then likely to purchase.
I don’t mean this as a negative thing as such. It’s just Microsoft being better at selling products to enterprise organisations than anyone else. One of the reasons Azure has grown from around 10% to 25% of the global market share during the previous past 5-10 years while AWS has actually lost its position is simply sales. When AWS first entered Europe they were a lot like Google Cloud, in that even if you were a municipality you would end up in an automated support loop. Then Azure came along and sold the same Microsoft support as they’ve always done, which is basically the best IT business partner you can have as an enterprise organisation, and naturally they won. It’s not like Amazon didn’t notice, a few months after Azure really rolled out we suddenly had an AWS account manager and direct phone support. But by then the ship had sort of sailed because of how Microsoft simply offers great value. Teams is another good example, it was a worse communications platform than what we had at the time, but it was “free” because it was attached to every user license we had, including the cheap educational ones. Almost nobody in non-tech enterprise will spend money on something they get for free, even if the free product takes years to become as good.
VSCode is the same. We pay for co-pilot and we pay for a lot of the Azure integrations, because why wouldn’t we? In the giant IT budget heading to Microsoft they are tiny costs which are in the “services” category in the excel sheet that heads for the budget. It is tiny, but when you consider just how many EU enterprise organisations buy these services it’ll amount to millions and for some services billions of revenue for Microsoft.
A good way to think of the “new” Microsoft strategy is similar to how cartoons are used to sell toys. You can watch Lego Dreamzzz for free on YouTube because Lego knows it means a lot of people are going to buy their Dreamzzz sets. It’s the same thing with VSCode. On top of that, they’re winning the familiarity game. When you hire a new developer, they’ll want to use what they know, which for many people is VSCode.
Agree with your post, but this gist still doesn´t make much sense to me:
> VSCode is build to sell Azure and other Microsoft services, which they won’t if you use VSCodium
If corporate has bought into MS, they will use Azure services anyway. So for MS it would not matter if vscodium also integrates well with Azure or has a good .net core debugger, their customers will still bring the whole IT budget to them.
Because you are spot on. Corporate buys the whole MS store, only walk the road that MS marketing has blessed and it happily walks into the Azure trap. They outsource IT strategy and planning to MS anyway, and MS names it "Azure".
I’m agree, but my organisation is an example of one which would be in the atlassian ecosystem if it wasn’t for the MS integrations. Which would honestly also be there from the Azure CLI but I’m the only one who uses that and no decision maker likes it. I’m not advocating for it since I personally dislike the atlassian ecosystem (shhhhh).
>What incentive do they have to keep it secret except being evil?
Money. Which is OK. Developers need salaries. They need to justify the department budget to bean counters and sales internally. The company you work for is most likely not a charity too.
If you want to strictly use free software (as I do), VsCodium is great for everything I need.
You can't use Gitpod, Theia IDE, etc with Pylance. Or GitHub Copilot. Or Live Share or numerous other VSCode extensions.
The idea is people start a project in VS Code, need to scale up to a reproducible dev environment for multiple users, and follow ads in VSCode to GitHub Codespaces, which charges by the hour for VMs. Now you're locked into that, you're locked into GitHub as well, and they can cross sell you GitHub Actions, GitHub Advanced Security &etc.
Therefore, Pyright is almost the minimum needed to add type checking to your CI process.
Edit: to clarify, not only is Codespaces advertised in VS Code, it also uses private APIs so no competitor can publish an extension which replicates this functionality on the VSCode marketplace.
Like I wrote here [0], corporate has an azure subscription. All the companies code repositories already live there, including build automation. A capable vscodium isn´t going to eat into Azure baseline.
I don´t think MS is after solo hobby devs. For startups they have other incentives to lure them into their ecosystem, like free Azure credits.
And that is why open source projects on github are free too. Because the paying organizations depend on the free software ecosystem, build by volunteers in their free time. MS wants control [1] about that nonetheless, because not having that is a risk to their baseline
1. That is not necessarily harming libre software per se, but keep in mind that MS is only interested into OSS as long as their commercial customers depend on it.
They make money with VsCode (by forced, or at least hard to disable, telemetry, ads [1], and probably many other subtle things. Plenty of ways to monetize developer eyeballs). Pylance is just a vehicle to encourage people to use proprietary VsCode instead of open forks like VsCodium.
> The funny thing is that I’ll never understand why it’s not open source and why its license prohibits its use in VSCodium.
And also the fact that Pyright, the underlying library that powers Pylance, is open source. Microsoft even has a mostly workable demo extension built from it, which is fully open source, published in their marketplace, and receives regular updates.
The funny thing is that I’ll never understand why it’s not open source and why its license prohibits its use in VSCodium. Pylance is good, but not that good. Certainly not on a level of PyCharm. What incentive do they have to keep it secret except being evil?