Unlike IE, VS Code is open source though. If Microsoft does some terrible thing with VS Code, the community can just switch to VSCodium: https://vscodium.com/
It's not. VSC is a packaged version of the open-source code with proprietary bits added. Integration with the plugin marketplace, telemetry, etc. VSCodium does not have that.
In addition, a lot of the good language plugins are proprietary, like PyLance and the C# plugin.
This doesn't really match since the "Embrace" part is different.
The classic formula was "embracing" an established standard, making proprietary extensions to that standard, then using the adoption of those proprietary extensions to extinguish the original standard's market share.
In this case, Microsoft didn't embrace an existing code base or standard, they made one and open sourced it. What would the analagous "extinction" bere here? That they eventually stop releasing updates to VSCode as open source?
While I agree that there is good reason to doubt Microsoft's intention to be a good steward of an open source project, this seems less like another iteration of that playbook and more like what a lot of "open source" for-profit companies do where they have an open core but keep many features proprietary so they can't be easily forked.
It is quite easy to see that the "embrace" is to release a core into the open source world. They embraced the idea of open source and released something, they extended the user base into the world of the non-free option. The thinking is if they can get a critical mass of folks onto the option that is non-free, they will extinguish the free option by no longer supporting it.
And this is not much different from the things they did this with back in the day. Used to, you wouldn't target open source, as much as you would student audience. The battle used to be more over what corporate workforces would want and use. The open source development scene changed that a bit. Though, it is kind of... interesting to consider how many tools and ideas have been lost in that process.
> The thinking is if they can get a critical mass of folks onto the option that is non-free, they will extinguish the free option by no longer supporting it.
I assume you mean "non-free" as in speech, not beer, since VSCode is free. Hasn't that "critical mass" been the case since day one? I can't imagine that VSCodium built binaries have ever had more than a tiny fraction of the user-base of VSCode? Thus I don't see how "Extinquish" plays a role here.
I still think it makes more sense to think of the strategy as more akin to the FOSS-washing / freemium models used by many companies.
Yes, non-free as in speech. Though, if they were to flip it from the "beer" sense of the term, I'm not entirely clear that would make much difference. As long as they have tripped the critical mass of the userbase.
And it is very similar to the freemium models used by many companies. Apologies if I made that sound like a disagreement. I think the point was more that Microsoft doing it is part of their old game plan. Random companies acting in other means is a bit of a non-sequitur. That said, I think it is common idea that many other companies have tried to extinguish competition in their "free" market? That is, many companies do what they can to make it easy for hobbyists and such to use things for free, but as soon as you are in a company, they try to milk the company for fees.
There are several android distros that provide support for a de-googled installation. Calling it "impossible" seems like a bit of a stretch, though there are definitely limitations, even with microg installed.
I do think that the VSCode model is much more similar to the Android model (though Android is a more extreme version of the model) than either is to the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" model.
