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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

Back during the early 2000s, when OpenOffice threatened to eat Microsoft's lunch, they created the new .docx/.pptx/.xlsx Office Open XML file formats and got ISO to standardize them as ISO 29500-1.

The standard isn't detailed enough to create your own Office implementation. Not even Microsoft Office implements it correctly. Microsoft only created the standard so they could claim they were as open as OpenOffice, to prevent OpenOffice from becoming the standard, to make sure third parties would continue building upon Microsoft Office, and to ensure third party implementations would always be slightly worse.

As leaked emails later showed, even Microsoft employees used the Embrace Extend Extinguish term to describe this project.

I'm not sure why you think the VSCode situation is so different.

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> I'm not sure why you think the VSCode situation is so different.

I'm not sure how they're related? How is something MS allegedly did with Office over 20 years ago related at all?

It's not like they can make plaintext source files incompatible with other IDEs

Microsoft pretended Office was open so third parties would continue building an ecosystem around Office. But no matter how "open" Office was, you had to get MS Office to get the best experience, so no one could really compete.

Microsoft pretends VSCode is open so third parties continue building an ecosystem around VSCode. But no matter how "open" VSCode is, you have to get real VSCode to get the best experience, no one else can really compete.

Do you understand it now? It was never about the files themselves, but always about add-ins, extensions and an entire ecosystem.

>Microsoft pretends VSCode is open so third parties continue building an ecosystem around VSCode.

That's not the case here. Gitpod wants extensions for free to monetize them.

The text editor is free and open-source, and they utilize it for their UI, as shown in the tweet posted in the blog. Someone observed that many tools employ the VSCode UI.

The VSCode Marketplace is Microsoft's proprietary platform for VSCode extensions, separate from the open-source code.

However, anyone can create their own marketplace for open-source VSCode extensions.

The EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) tactics you described don't apply to VSCode.

EEE typically involves Microsoft embracing a standard and then killing it. there's no standard to embrace. When we have thousands of text editors out there, each with their own extension ecosystems.

The extension interface that matters here is LSP (which Microsoft introduced).

You can't get enough users to actually make building your own LSP for C# worth it.

But you also can't use Microsoft's C# LSP unless you ship unmodified VS Code.

As result, GitHub's codespaces, VS Code and Azure are the only ones that can have a usable C# LSP.

Do you see the issue now?

> As leaked emails later showed, even Microsoft employees used the Embrace Extend Extinguish term to describe this project.

Source?

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