co-founder of Coder (the company behind code-server) here…
We found that the biggest inhibitor to remote development was the lack of environmental flexibility. For example, Codespaces confines you to an ephemeral Linux container running on Azure, and our old product confined users to semi-stateful Kubernetes pods.
With coder/coder, you can use any operating system on any kind of compute on any cloud and change every single configuration knob. You can also mix and match cloud resources. An early user has hundreds of cloud resources in each workspace, including IAM roles, secrets, and network rules.
Early users are running stateful VMs running on GCP, Docker containers on big servers, Kubernetes Pods, and Windows VMs on Azure. We’re stoked to watch people adopt remote development in their own ways.
Creator of the original https://github.com/coder/code-server and co-founder of https://coder.com here. Microsoft’s code-server uses their official extension marketplace, allowing LiveShare, Pylance, and other proprietary extensions in their browser VS Code experience. Their license prevents users from “hosting it as a service” meaning you can’t productize their code-server like you can ours.
We’re disappointed that Microsoft chose to release under the `code-server` command-line name. Our community has produced countless blog posts, videos, StackOverflow questions, etc. that will become difficult for our users to find. This naming decision suggests that Microsoft aims to replace our code-server instead of coexisting.
We will continue developing our code-server until Microsoft’s has parity. As for Coder, we’re focusing more on the platform side (https://github.com/coder/coder) and less on making IDEs work remotely.
I know this will get downvoted into oblivion and I'm not defending Microsoft, but....
I'm symapthic to your plight but you named your product based on 2 common nouns. It'd be like someone making a restaurant called "hamburger" and the complaining that others are confusing people because they sell "hamburger".
If you're starting a new project/product and don't not want to end up here you should probably pick a more unique name. Examples. Python, not 'scripting-lang', "Firefox" not "browser" or "web-browser", "gIMP" not "Image-editor", "mongodb" not "database" etc...
And I know someone is going to nitpick that "Python" is just a noun but in context it's got nothing to do with languages, computing, etc. so it works as not directly describing the product in ways that others are likely to use when the come out with a similar product.
Their cli commands generic, but their product name has always been distinct. It has always been Visual Studio Code and now Visual Studio Code Server. VS Code, VS code server for short.
Your branding, "coder" and "code-server", is just super generic and popular terms. That's what makes it hard to search for, not the cli command names.
Perhaps since public release, but I was informed by a PM who was part of the original product development that this was a concession to marketing, and it did not always have the name “visual studio” attached.
Which is exactly OPs point. If they’d brought it forth with just the name “code” it would have been just as dumb as these guys complaining about code-server. Which is exactly why it ended up vscode, which is destiny enough that it possible both to market, distinguish and protect as a brand.
Worth mentioning that gitpod's openvscode-server is a third option. I prefer it to code-server since gitpod's has proper parity with a desktop vscode install, while coder's implementation fails to work with several plugins when loading them in manually
Thanks for everything you've done to develop code-server! I'm disappointed Microsoft didn't attempt to name theirs differently, although I supposed it _is_ a fairly obvious choice.
Personally, while I use and enjoy both GitHub and VSCode, I'm wary of buying too much into their ecosystem. So I'll continue to use things like GitPod and Coder's code-server so I can support the wider ecosystem and third-party OSS implementers in this space.
