Interesting post about VS Code and Extensions

That is when you put profit first over privacy.!

I know some people love to hate Microsoft - but where's the profit in VS Code?

It's free. It's open source. Lots of companies have chosen to extend it (e.g. Nordic) or base their tooling around it (e.g. TI Code Composer Studio Theia) because it's really good.

Fred27 said:

I know some people love to hate Microsoft - but where's the profit in VS Code?

Some things are passive.

Once you're in "the ecosystem" the profit becomes two things:

- Telemetry

- Reliance on services

VS Code gets you at the beginning, perhaps you need a simple editor? Then maybe it grabs some telemetry and data about how you use it, that's valuable to Microsoft.

Maybe you start working on a project? Well, VS Code gets you so far, but what if you signed up to github? Your code's now on there, version controlled, but now it's a big project and you need a team? Maybe you need compilation services? Is it too far-fetched to suggest that now you need Visual Studio instead, and a github teams license/repository?

And what about those azure services?

It's free advertising. You make a loss in one area, but you gain in other areas. The ones that don't buy into the system you typically don't care about, but it's word of mouth advertising by them at that point. Have you ever seen a 'visual studio' advert? or a 'vs code' advert? I haven't, but somehow I know entirely about the software.

Andrew J said:

I came across this article this morning which I thought was interesting enough to share

Thanks for sharing, that's utterly frightening.

Here, have one in return:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/25/polyfillio_china_crisis/ 

Thanks.  This was 'eye opening' to say the least.

Blimey.  I'm so glad I'm retired and don't have to worry about this at a professional/customer level anymore.  I think my default position would be to not download plugins, extensions, whatever if I don't really need the functionality.  It would be nice if licenses for products from the like of JetBrains weren't so expensive for single users.

Retired or not, we're all disrupted when bad software is deployed across an industry. Have you tried to buy a car this month? I didn't get hacked, and my dealer didn't get hacked, but we all take a hit when poorly written software controls a whole channel.

Now, about that hospital's software... 

Yes, but it's not my responsibility anymore to ensure it doesn't happen or fix it when it does.  I can't live my life worrying about what isn't under my control!

Free software does not mean privacy is compromised and it also does not mean abusing content on their platform is not taken care of. Also profit does not mean that one earns money out of a free software necessarily. Many social media platforms are free to use, but there are issues with them everyone knows that.

Comparatively look at online forums they are managed by moderators and people can not put anything on them until either they are verified or monitored constantly. Element14 also do that when we upload some form of media.

So, I do not hate Microsoft, in fact I did not know that VS code is from Microsoft before this post. But if you give a free software you are also killing a market for paid software and if some important feature does not work there is an excuse also that it is for free so one cannot demand more..! always. Better would be a paid software(not very expensive though) but well managed.

I retired in 2018 from an IT Security position. I am both relieved and terrified at vulnerabilities. Working in the industry I felt secure in gaining knowledge but it was a lot of work to keep up to date. Leaving the industry I don't have to maintain the knowledge but without it I'm never sure if things are secure.

I just moved to VSC to take advantage of git. One step ahead, two steps back.