Both Visual Studio and the Jetbrains IDEs are commercial and they're considered some of the best tools available on the market. Quality tools can still command a decent price.
To put things into perspective, IntelliJ has been battling both Eclipse and Netbeans for ages and it is (slowly) winning.
Yes it makes perfect sense that they're selling it. I'm not saying it doesn't.
What I'm saying is that the comments here to the effect of "Microsoft has changed their stance" don't seem to be in touch with reality.
Microsoft has just realized relatively late that there's certain things that they can't make money on yet are still strategically important, such as core .NET technology, or JS engines.
That doesn't mean that they'll keep open sourcing stuff, or that they're not likely to pull back the second they think it services their commercial aims.
> "Microsoft has changed their stance" don't seem to be in touch with reality
I would say that porting MSSQL to Linux, open-sourcing .NET and ChakraCore (amongst other things) is definitely a change from the "Linux / OpenSource is a cancer" days, no?
Microsoft is in no way going to become the next Red Hat in running a service-only model onto of Open Source products. It doesn't make sense for them to do that. But the fact that they have accepted Open Source as a possibility for some of their products, and put that into action is a step in the right direction.
The fact that they are happy to ship proprietary products that are known to have backdoors doesn't make me believe they've changed their views on user freedom. It's a relevance ploy, nothing more.
You're probably right. The thing is, Microsoft is right now in existential danger, at least if it wants to grow, and I think it has to grow, because it's a public company.
Their core market (desktop/enterprise desktop) is basically saturated. Almost their secondary efforts have failed from a financial standpoint or are only second in their niche (Bing, Edge, Azure, Xbox, etc.).
Unless they pull off some sort of a miraculous switch:
* they'll continue to be perennial underdogs
* they'll opening things up in order to gain allies, through genuine community building
From my point of view, in a sort of twisted way, that basically means that they're safe from a open source point of view.
They'll have to develop communities in almost every area they want to compete in (which means that there will be stewards available if they back down) and they'll invest quite heavily in their open source contribution.
It might not be done for the purest reasons, but I think that their new contributions will be here with us for the long term.
To put things into perspective, IntelliJ has been battling both Eclipse and Netbeans for ages and it is (slowly) winning.