That being said, one of the most loved Electron applications, VSCode, is made by Microsoft and now Electron is essentially one of their assets.
It seems to me like this could mean good things for Electron.
Are there any ways you can think of that MS can improve that ecosystem?
Security is an area that could use a lot of improvements. Along with keeping Chromium up-to-date, sandboxing still needs more work [2].
Personally, I'd like to see greater support for Chrome Extensions instead of Electron's preload scripts. They're much more powerful in terms of controlling when scripts are run.
* Replacing Chromium with Edge to improve integration with Windows 10.
* Introducing .NET runtime integration
* SharePoint and O365 integration which with the above would make it almost as powerful as SilverLight
* Cortana support baked-in
* Windows Telemetry
* Give Electron the ability to support multiple browser back-ends and use the user's preferred browser by default.
* Decouple Electron from JS/Node and allow developers to use whatever language they prefer to drive the native integration.
* Improve their JS SDKs for SharePoint, OneDrive, and O365.
* Port their Cortana SDK from WinJS to Node.
* Can't help here.
>* Windows Telemetry
Doesn't telemetry come by default with .NET ?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetry
Simply put, any data gathering or telemetry that is default opt-in deserves scorn.
I say this as someone who's used Microsoft development tools since QBasic and VB 3.
If Microsoft can do things now with Electron that it couldn't before, there's arguably something wrong with the project.
It's not the license at issue, it's the copyright which allows MS to change the license.
Yes, developers could fork the project, but that seems premature at this point.
What will probably is that MS will make optimizations for VS Code to run even better and then make those optimizations open for everyone.
They already could of with the MIT licensed Electron... Literally nothing stopped them from doing this prior, unless the project as said has a bad structure but I find it hard to believe.
This would mean that you'd have to spend work re-merging your changes back with the main branch when a new version of Electron came out.
Now there's just one version, and it looks like MS controls the copyright to it. And that means their patches could come first before others.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but I thought I'd clarify.
The owner of the copyright can relicense. Third parties can use the code to the license, but cannot relicense the code itself.
While MIT is very permissive, it doesn't give you permission to change the license, nor does it grant you the copyright to the underlying code.
That said, if there is a direction to hope for, it might be pushing more of Electron's "value add" into the web platform itself (ie, open more standards for PWAs to adopt). Though arguably many of the things that developers particularly want from Electron like macOS menu integration are pretty strongly platform-specific and tough to standardize in way that might make sense to the web platform as a whole.
But if the project is given the same governance model and love which VSCode gets, I would have much higher hopes.
Yes, by killing it.
Dreams...
What do those 3 apps have in common? They are brilliant Electron creations. They manage to beat even Java IDEs in memory consumption for no good reason.