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Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks
(www.theregister.com)
sounds like M$'s real face : Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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holy shit! the thing I've been warning developers who promote and use this shitty tool has finally happened.
shockedpikachu.jpeg
if you write fossy software, don't use products made by fossy enemies.
A company that is known for doing shitty things does shitty things.
Color me fucking surprised.
Honestly, at this point, I have ZERO sympathy for people who are still actively using microsoft products and running into problems.
Yeah, they have already done this with other extensions like Python, this is not new behavior.
Honestly the biggest reason to stay away from VS Code
What are other free and good ide's though?
Closest? VScodium lol
Kate, KDevelop, QtCreator are the ones I use.
An AI company not respecting copyright and licensing? I'm shocked.
A few things to point out:
- Microsoft created this extension and pays money to develop it
- Despite that, they give it to programmers for free. It is still free of charge.
- They explicitly said that using it outside of their products is forbidden (according to article: at least 5 years ago), they just didn't enforce it
- Someone (here: Cursor developers), despite that, used it in their products and started to make money from it
What exactly are you mad at? When will programming community finally understand that Microsoft is not a non-profit company and its primary purpose is to make money?
I heard Theo talking about this and I think he guessed that they don't want to maintain these against forks is the number of people raising issues that are not related to the extension and more due to the fork.
His video goes into a lot of good detail as to what's likely going on.
What Theo also says is that remember that they don't make any money off of VSCode at all.
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ Because pretending your editor is open source while moving all the important functionality to proprietary plugins is a bait and switch.
Embrace.
Extend.
~~Extinguish~~. Extract rent now that everyone lives in / depends on your proprietary ecosystem.
I'd say they can't keep getting away with it!, but history shows they clearly can.
Literally monopolist strategy 101.
This was all people were talking about when they bought GitHub. We've past the "Extend" stage now.
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It's also blocked in VSCodium whose developers are not making money off it.
So that's not a nice thing.
At least VSCodium cares about software licenses, (see it works both ways)
That Cursor (an AI focused) fork doesn’t shouldn’t be very shocking.
Because a .vscode still pollute most open source projects. It"s annoying that they get people hooked on it that could use better tools instead.
How dare people choose their own software? Don't they know theyre supposed to let you choose it for them?
You can choose whatever software you want. You can use WYSIWYG for all i care.
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The problem is that they're killing competition. Treating a company with the market dominance of Microsoft like a normal company would be fatal for humanity. Because they are eliminating innovation by Cursor and they do not need to do this to finance their own innovation. Effectively, humanity gets less innovation by Microsoft doing this.
But Microsoft developed it in the first place. It's perfectly within their rights to pull it and developers making money off of their work isn't bad either. I love a good pitchfork to corporate, but this is honestly fine.
Well; companies used to get anti-trust laser canon'ed from orbit for less; but good luck with that in modern America
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The problem is that they’re killing competition.
So, they pay to develop a product, for themselves, explicitly says "it's only for us, shoo shoo", and when they decide that their product, that they pay for, and provide for free to their user, should not be used by other, it kills the competition that did not do anything except take the product for free despite being told not to?
I'm not on the side of Microsoft for most things. But if doing nothing but taking someone else's free product qualifies to be competition that should be protected, we're having problems.
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Don't be upset it took people a long time to realize Visual Studio Code is fauxpen source, just be glad they're finally realizing it. No need to be condescending and make people feel ashamed over it.
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Stallman was right, episode five billion.
Just violate their rules and enable the microsoft extensions on forks
That's just it, these extensions themselves refuse to run if the fork doesn't say it is vs code. You'd have to build it yourself to report compliant information to the extension, or build the extension yourself to not check. Both of which are not trivial.
Oh, Microsoft is pulling the rug under your feet?
That's fuckin' news right there!
Here we go!!! I was expecting the enshitification of this thing for past couple of years
You are late. They have already did the same with C# extension, and made it closed source too.
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Not sure about the c/c++ support, but zed has greatly improved and it's looking like a real long term alternative at this point
They pulled the same thing with their widely used office format: base capabilities are standardised but most useful stuff is proprietary extension.
If someone is looking for an alternative, use the clangd extension. It’s much better compared to the Microsoft one. LLDB extension is good for debugging. Also works with gdb.
The only things I am lacking now is the one for remote, python.
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Good opportunity for Jetbrains to jump in. Maybe if they MIT licensed their community-edition tools.
Jetbrains have gone the opposite direction unfortunately. The latest version of PyCharm came with the announcement that PyCharm Community is being discontinued. Instead, they will provide just one PyCharm (the closed source one) formerly PyCharm Professional, that can operated in a Basic (Free) mode, or a Pro (Licenced) mode. Also, some features that were free in Community edition will be moved to the Pro mode in the new PyCharm.
It doesn't affect me personally because my workplace pays for a pro subscription for me, but I used PyCharm Community for 4 years during uni and I'm sad it's going.
Not sure if you read this blog post: https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2025/04/unified-pycharm/
Rest assured – our commitment to open-source development remains as strong as ever. The Community Edition codebase will stay public on GitHub, and we’ll continue to maintain and update it. We’ll also provide an easy way to build PyCharm from source via GitHub Actions.
PyCharm is - like all JetBrains IDEs - based on intellij-community and the "Pro" stuff just some fancy pre-installed plugin that requires a license.
Alternatively, you may choose to manually switch to the new PyCharm immediately and keep using everything you have now for free, plus the support for Jupyter notebooks.
So all community functionallities will also be available in the unified edition for free.
Also the Pro license - which you can also get 4 free in like 10 different ways - pricing is extremely fair: A license costs $100-60 for an individual, which is cheaper than most streaming subscriptions...
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Maybe it's just me, but I never got that thing to work right anyway - with VSC. It keeps running amok and using up all the CPU time doing stuff it should not be doing, trying to analyze every single file in my VM every single time it is started.
So... good riddance.
Maybe we need a new movement (or revisit past ideas from the 70s) that focuses on ensuring the openness regarding freedoms of computing (😉) that combat proprietary SaaS offerings? idk.
This is why OSS as an org needs a change IMO. Licenses like SSPLv1, where software can be supplied for free with options that allow a company to make money without risk of a cloud vendor snapping up their software (think Redis, MongoDB, etc) need a place at the table.
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Good example why you don't want to use and rely on proprietary software (the extension is not 100% open source as I understand), if there are free (as in source code and license) alternatives.
A professor once told me “don’t trust ‘free software’ from a megacorp”, most important thing I learned in college.
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Microsoft
C/C++ extension
VS Code
so sad 🎤 🎻😢
https://open-vsx.org/extension/llvm-vs-code-extensions/vscode-clangd
Maybe not as feature complete but should be a good alternative
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