I understand that it might not look so in a first instance, but the whole idea is that you will own nothing and they will have control on everything you do.
You don't have anymore your own computer with your own code editor, compiler and co free to do whatever you want for life.
It's the same kind of thing as what happened with the Adobe suite that become fully SaaS even if it looks more subtile because at first the subscription looks "free".
What is fun to see is that people forgot where we come from, the good old world of mainframes with IBM in control of expensive and exclusive software.
And more recently with the original visual studio (desktop) that was expensive, totally bloated and restricted to Windows. But a strong requirement for any professional.
And then, gcc, gnu, linux, open source code editors and SCM ... Free Software disturbed everything. Everyone could develop and compile on his own computer. On his own term, corporate control free.
And then Microsoft started to be in panic mode, until they started to apply again the old rule book of embrace, extend, and extinguish...
We approach the last phase now, they start to have again a major dominance and control in the essential developer tooling space directly or indirectly...
So beware...
dtagames•6mo ago
VA Code a free and open source product so I hardly think a panic is justified.
For new or non-regular users, a hosted version is quite convenient. It reads local files and GitHub repos, just like the version you install, which is also just a web application, wrapped in Electron.
greatgib•6mo ago
What is VA? VS you mean?
Everyone knows this theory that vscode is open source except that it isn't really. The base is open source, but essential things are not like access to extensions, some most important language servers,...
As far as I see, "VS Code for the web" is not open source no? Free it is somehow, for the moment, if you are working with GitHub repos, in the limit of free accounts of GitHub, accepting the conditions like constant telemetry and Microsoft having access to all your code data, ...
dtagames•6mo ago
Yes, I missed a typo too late to fix it.
You could host VS Code somewhere yourself if you wanted to. The most rational use case is to install it locally, like most people do.
They offer a hosted version because they can and it looks cool to send people a link to a running IDE.
greatgib•6mo ago
I understand that it might not look so in a first instance, but the whole idea is that you will own nothing and they will have control on everything you do.
You don't have anymore your own computer with your own code editor, compiler and co free to do whatever you want for life.
It's the same kind of thing as what happened with the Adobe suite that become fully SaaS even if it looks more subtile because at first the subscription looks "free".
What is fun to see is that people forgot where we come from, the good old world of mainframes with IBM in control of expensive and exclusive software.
And more recently with the original visual studio (desktop) that was expensive, totally bloated and restricted to Windows. But a strong requirement for any professional.
And then, gcc, gnu, linux, open source code editors and SCM ... Free Software disturbed everything. Everyone could develop and compile on his own computer. On his own term, corporate control free.
And then Microsoft started to be in panic mode, until they started to apply again the old rule book of embrace, extend, and extinguish...
We approach the last phase now, they start to have again a major dominance and control in the essential developer tooling space directly or indirectly...
So beware...
dtagames•6mo ago
For new or non-regular users, a hosted version is quite convenient. It reads local files and GitHub repos, just like the version you install, which is also just a web application, wrapped in Electron.
greatgib•6mo ago
Everyone knows this theory that vscode is open source except that it isn't really. The base is open source, but essential things are not like access to extensions, some most important language servers,...
As far as I see, "VS Code for the web" is not open source no? Free it is somehow, for the moment, if you are working with GitHub repos, in the limit of free accounts of GitHub, accepting the conditions like constant telemetry and Microsoft having access to all your code data, ...
dtagames•6mo ago
You could host VS Code somewhere yourself if you wanted to. The most rational use case is to install it locally, like most people do.
They offer a hosted version because they can and it looks cool to send people a link to a running IDE.