> Everyone is reading this as intentional anti-competitive practices. While that may be true, isn't another reasonable explanation that the Copilot development team is moving as fast as they can and these sorts of workarounds are being forced through in the name of team velocity?
Wouldn't another way of saying that be "the Copilot development team is leveraging their Microsoft ownership to create products in a way not available to the general marketplace?"
The goal might not be to squash competition, but blessing one client with special treatment not available to others can still be anti-competitive.
Whether that would fall afoul of any regulation is beyond my expertise. Naively, most companies have internal APIs that are not generally available. But then most companies don't have paid public marketplaces on their platform.
Is it even not available to competitors? Visual studio is open source. Didn't cusor fork it and is building it features directly into the fork? Not doing something like this would make Copilot at a disadvantage.
Sort of. The core is, and the installable binaries with telemetry and properietary extensions are not.
The open source, telemetry-free version of VSCode is called VSCodium: https://vscodium.com/
> Didn't cusor fork it and is building it features directly into the fork?
Yes, in their recent interview with Lex Fridman they argued that life as an extension is too limiting.
The main reason we criticise Microsoft for doing this and not them is just their size and market dominance.
Why jump through hoops to make competitors better able to hotwire their own AI into VSCode, or hotwire Copilot into their own IDE, when it's easier to iterate fast and remain unpredictable?
> Why jump through hoops to make competitors better able
Because that is the competitive philosophy that allowed VS Code win in this space. It fits with that great quote from Bill Gates: "A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it."
By having VS Code give a priority to another MS/GitHub product that they aren't willing to give competitors, they're diminishing VS Code's value as a platform, and encouraging competitors to build their own IDEs rather than building on top of it.
do you have anything respectful to say, or just this disrespectful, dismissive response?
If you want to have a discussion, then let's have one. Step one is to have the discussion in good faith. If you're not capable of that, then don't respond at all.
The fact that you can access source code allowing you to build a telemetry-free version of VSCode doesn’t magically make what’s actually distributed open source and telemetry free.
The sole thing you can actually download and run while calling it VS Code - a trademarked name - is neither open source nor telemetry-free.
But Cursor had to fork, so as a developer wanting to use them, you need to give up VS Code and install a new code editor, and you can’t just install a plugin. Very few can maintain a fork and get enough people to use their fork. Also what happens if you have two products that needed a fork? You can’t use them both.
I don’t know if it’s legal or not, IANAL, but it feels definitely anti competitive.
Competitors compete in the same market. The market in this case is VS Code extensions, with the consumers in that market being the user base of VS Code, not the users of some fork of VS Code. You can't point your competitors to a different market and then reasonably claim to be open to competition.
Now, I'm not a big fan of VS Code as of lately. I find the changes, that first broke Customize UI + MonkeyPatch extensions to make it look not completely shit on macOS, and now the change that broke APC too that replaced the first two, completely user-hostile and the PM response in GH issues to that very poor. But this specific lie about what is OSS and what isn't, and how it's used annoys me a lot. You are not helping with the problem.
Wouldn't another way of saying that be "the Copilot development team is leveraging their Microsoft ownership to create products in a way not available to the general marketplace?"
The goal might not be to squash competition, but blessing one client with special treatment not available to others can still be anti-competitive.
Whether that would fall afoul of any regulation is beyond my expertise. Naively, most companies have internal APIs that are not generally available. But then most companies don't have paid public marketplaces on their platform.