Comment by gucci-on-fleek
12 hours ago
> Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades.
VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.
> MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company
I'm pretty sure that all of those (aside from Xbox) are profitable on their own, so I don't think that them becoming independent would kneecap them at all.
Is GitHub really profitable, considering how much Actions credits are given away to open source projects as well as free users? Same goes for Copilot.
> Is GitHub really profitable
Well I had assumed that GitHub was profitable, since it used to be independent, and it feels like it should be profitable right now. But I tried Googling "is GitHub profitable" just now, and the first few results seem to suggest that either it's still losing money or that nobody knows. So I was likely incorrect about that point, sorry.
> considering how much Actions credits are given away to open source projects as well as free users?
GitLab does the same thing, and they are definitely profitable [0], so that on its own isn't necessarily a barrier.
[0]: https://ir.gitlab.com/news/news-details/2026/GitLab-Reports-...
They said cottage industry, not software industry.
Edit: s/he/they/woops sorry
OK but is that even true? Lots of people buy IntelliJ licenses (or if they've stopped I'm guessing it has more to do with Claude Code than VS Code).
By the way, Claude Code works well from inside emacs.
> VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.
Why not? That’s 11 years, times (say) 5 potential independent editors or IDE that didn’t exist because of VSCode in that time is over 50 years worth of software innovation.
How does the existence of VSCode stop the creation of other editors? The existence of other editors clearly didn't prevent VSCode from being created, so what's different?