> Cursor allegedly has been flouting Microsoft terms-of-service rules for some time now by setting up a reverse proxy to mask its network requests to the endpoints used by the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace. This allows Cursor users to install VS Code extensions from Microsoft's market. Other VS Code forks tend to point to Open VSX, an alternative extension marketplace.
Either you don't get caught and can move faster, or you get caught and the penalty is usually small and a long way down the line, by which time your company will have either folded or grown enough to pay without difficulty.
That is not the scenario here. Cursor is being hunted by an extremely motivated corporate competitor. Cursor has been leeching the gorilla's blood and the gorilla finally noticed. Microsoft doesn't (necessarily) need the law here. They have it if they need it, but they can kill Cursor without needing to sue them. The disastrous outcome isn't a penalty--it's a critical mass of users switching to Copilot because they can't use their Microsoft extensions in Cursor any more. Cutting off the extensions on the same day that their Cursor clone went live was effectively a declaration of war from Microsoft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Antitrust
Awesome software, but I don't trust the upstream org further than I must.
Weird, ADS is dead and nobody spent any time on it, I wonder why.
Debugging isn't in yet, but is actively being worked on and planned for public release before 1.0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065, there's an active channel in their Discord discussing the development of the feature.
In short: Corporate politics and the Cursor team taking the path of least resistance.
I actually worked a bunch on the language server logic in Zed trying to get a bunch of it to work on Windows. All I have to say about that is: ugh.
I figure e.g. emacs will always be there when that happens.
All I need is a Github Copilot clone and a good code search feature.
Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.
Oh and the ssh remote extension.
I'm using https://github.com/copilot-emacs/copilot.el
> good code search feature.
project-find-regexp is a nice start.
> Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.
(global-auto-revert-mode t)
> Oh and the ssh remote extension.
I haven't compared it to Tramp.
or you could just use copilot through copilot.el
> and a good code search feature.
Like through helm or ivy?
> Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.
My emacs does that, and I don't think I did anything special to get it.
> Oh and the ssh remote extension.
like tramp?
Yep, vscode is more intuitive.
However emacs is mostly the kind of thing you dedicate a couple of months of discomfort and enjoy for the rest of your life. Quite literally.
Spending some money on the “mastering emacs” book (https://www.masteringemacs.org/) is worth imho.
Bonus point: little by little you start enjoying doing more stuff in emacs. It’s a meme, but it’s true.
And "Mastering Emacs" is brilliant.
MS made some very real and very usable innovations. Emacs hackers/maintainers would be wise to copy them, like I'm sure Microsoft copied things from emacs.
It's a bit like the UI aspect of the browser wars. Everyone wins when good things are cloned and then iteratively improved upon.
Generalizing it: Having smart people who really understand UX helps a lot with minimizing those months of pain before the payoff.
To me the former is tolerable, the latter is not.
If anyone remembers WCF/AppFabric/WWF and Silverlight, that was the last stack I rewrote someone out of the shit on.
I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell.
After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.
Due to experiences like that I refused to buy volume licenses from them, too. Sometime later I got an audit demand for which I had a reply ready.
"lol, no."
Also, if you do open source contributions, never ever agree to assign copyright to the project: doing so means the project owners can relicense the code base, even towards proprietary license.
Half of the initial mac os x kernel was ripped off freebsd, giving pretty much nothing back.
Afaik netapp is also basing their system on bsd.
Sony uses freebsd as the OS for their playstation.
And many more, giving essentially nothing back.
That is open source.
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...
I think project governance matters more than license, and the BSDs are great examples.
Having said that, I’ve soured on the GPL. V3 more-or-less bans companies from selling you hardware that runs free software, but lets Google, Meta, etc use the software to expand their cloud-based monopolies where surveillance capitalism and enshittification have won out.
AGPL or BSL seem much better if you want free as in freedom. BSD and Apache at least don’t force your software off of machines that end users control.
Yes, BSL is not open (TM) or free (TM) or whatever. It’s still better IMHO, since it at least has some path to revenue for the developers.
Maybe against the store rules tho, dunno.
I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.
How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".
Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
The opening of Proverbs has:
1:5. Let the wise hear and increase in learning[...]
Ever since I got remote mode working, I haven’t noticed any missing functionality I care about. (I also haven’t tried installing extensions for the pile of commercial services work uses, and that I wouldn’t pay for anyway.)
Edit: Since cursor now has near infinite VC money, perhaps they should fund a few open source devs to work on those forks. Why should they get a free ride?
Me, personally? No, because they're honest about it. I use BBEdit and Nova frequently on my Mac. Those are as closed source as it gets. They never pretend otherwise, though. You pay your money and you know what you're getting. VSCode tries really hard to appear to be open source, as long as you're willing to ignore the million places where they aren't. (Python devs: are you using PyLance? I'm talking to you.)
And ironically, those closed editors seem to play more nicely with the ecosystem as a whole. Neither BBEdit nor Nova have ever tried to talk me into installing closed plugins, and the same plugins that work with them work great in Emacs and Zed.
If I go to one bar that charged $5 per beer, and another that gives free beer but makes you rent single-use mugs for $5, even though the end price is identical, the rental bar's going to annoy me horrendously. Just admit what it is and let people judge on their own merits.
> Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
What collective problem, that someone might have to unexpectedly burn a weekend writing a new editor? That {emacs|vim} isn't popular enough? That people might have to go install openjdk in order to start using eclipse?
Where this has become increasingly problematic is rampant materialism and corporatism.
If the only real motivator in town, especially for the powerful, is material gain then there is nothing to constrain wanton greed. This becomes even more pronounced with corporations because their overtly stated purpose is not but greed, so even if the individual actors have some transcend moral compass they will be in conflict to their programmed imperative to "do their job".
Currently many of the powerful are materialistic and materialism can bring worldly power. Other political paradigms may come to the fore but as it takes a form and gravity it will likely come into some dialectic conflict with the prevailing materialistic status quo. That may be a peaceful resolution, but I'd not be certain of that.
You just have to let go of things you have no real influence over.
The Microsoft C++ extension is not open source; not sure what people were expecting here.
They seem to have this backward. Visual Studio Code is a derivative product of VS Codium.
> This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.
"That's ancient history", they said.
"Lucy will hold the football this time for sure", they said.
I spent most of the past ~fifteen years working in Sublime and just switched between that and the terminal for build and test—not fancy, but then, C++ coding isn’t a speedrun. Sublime is clean, fast, and portable.
However, dev tooling has advanced so much now that I started learning and using neovim last year so I could take advantage of good syntax highlighting, LSP, and CoPilot. I don’t get enough daily reps to be good at core vi yet (I am a team manager so most of my time is spent asking questions of devs prefixed with “This is a really dumb question, but”) but despite all the techbros who’ve flocked to it I think neovim is pretty good technology and responsive. You can get the tooling features but control UI/UX; for me, I want as much code on the screen as possible, and I especially resent widgets that eat into vertical space. I started with one of the off-the-shelf all-in-one init.lua configs off github, but it was too complicated and I quickly broke things. What’s worked better is going through a video series on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHTeCSVAFNY&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...) and building up the init.lua I want from scratch. As noted, I’m not great with it, especially the normal vim motions, but I’ve learned to get around, it’s fast, I can see my code without a million distracting widgets, and I get the benefit of clangd and CoPilot.
But to me the appeal of nvim is being able to fully remove everything I dislike.
It's licensed under MIT + VS Marketplace Terms: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools?tab=License-1-o...
If you fork it and don't use VS Marketplace, it's only MIT. Or am I missing something?
(The license like that existed before cursor, it was basically the reason for vscodium)
(Source is https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod... the license link at the bottom)
The same problem with the c# extension, which has had an even bigger shitstorm since some parts of the extension need a ms account and depending on the company needs to be paid