"...that enable developers, organizations, and vendors to create new, extensible solutions that avoid the fees associated with VS Code."
What fees are they talking about? VS Code is not my regular editor, but the whole thing seems to indicate confusion between "Visual Studio" and "Visual Studio Code". I am missing something or is the Eclipse Foundation really conflating the two?
On behalf of the Eclipse Foundation, sorry for the mistake. The reference to the “fees” in the draft version of the Theia announcement posted to eclipse.org this morning was not correct. The official press release that was issued this morning removed the incorrect reference to fees. The release on eclipse.org has now been updated to match the official press release here: https://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/20200331-theia.php. Our apologies for this discrepancy and any resulting confusion.
So, avoid the non-existent fees of Microsoft and change them for the non-existent fees of Oracle and IBM. Sold!
But seriously, the Eclipse Foundation would be a much trustworthier steward for a wide-used IDE than Microsoft. Unfortunately, Eclipse is in the same situation Firefox was against Chrome 5 years ago: it's slow compared to other Java IDEs like Jetbrain's.
I wouldn't trust Oracle. Is this going to be like VirtualBox which is "free" and "open source" except for the extension pack on the very same page that you can one click download?
If anyone isn't aware, they track the IP address of that extension and if they can trace it back to your company they then come calling for money. It's basically a sort of litigation honey pot. Sure, it's all legal, but it's such a nasty dark pattern and so easy of a mistake to make for end users that it should be illegal.
How so? They're on the board of directors. They might not have SOLE control, but you're implying they have NO control. I'm not sure how they can both be on the board of directors while simultaneously having no control of the Eclipse IP.
Hm. I remember it having utterly horrible UX and looks, but being slow wasn't really a problem.
Especially the live compilation and whole project compilation error marking is something IntelliJ has not yet accomplished.
Yeah... but what the original post is about isn't the old Eclipse IDE we've all known and loved (to hate, maybe). But a new entry in the Electron based text editor craze... to me just glancing over the website, it looks like a VS Code clone.
That the Eclipse IDE itself is more an analogue to Visual Studio proper could be where some on the Eclipse marketing team are mixing up the two and mentioning "VS Code fees".
Why switch from VS Code to Codium? That makes even less sense than a switch to Eclipse.
If you're on VS Code, just use VS Code. If you're on Eclipse, just use Eclipse.
But yeah, get to market. Quibbling over quasi-religious beliefs, like X is better than Y, is exactly what allows some kid on his couch in his boxers watching SportsCenter while working on his website to beat your funded startup to market.
As I became involved in more and more products and customer feedback, I started opting into telemetry collection programs. It’s ultimately what helps make the products I use better.
Firstly, let me say that I'm a big advocate for privacy.
But, for products I love, I also sometimes opt in to telemetry - it depends on the product, the company, and the data that's collected.
In the case of Visual Studio Code, it's very clear what data is collected, and I decided I was fine with it. It's free, it's OSS, and I want to help make it even better.
My only gripe with VS Code is that the telemetry is opt-out, rather than opt-in. Yes, it's easy to opt-out, but that's not the point - IMO, it should always be opt-in.
In my opinion, you're doing it either wrong or lazy.
My company doesn't do telemetry. We do actual user testing with actual users, even to the point of shadowing them as they use the product. The same way it's been done for the last 40 years.
You learn more from interfacing with the wetware than you do grepping logs.
Why not both? User testing won't help you with questions like "there's a bug in feature X, but the fix will potentially impact feature Y in unforeseen ways. Given we're shipping soon, is it a good idea to apply the fix now or should we apply a much simpler mitigation and postpose the full fix till next iteration so we can get more testing in or even implement a larger refactoring that would resolve this category of bugs by design?"
If feature X is used way less frequently than feature Y, the answer is obvious. If feature Y is used way less frequently than feature X, the answer is obvious. If its a wash, you move on to look at different metrics.
This isn't a hypothetical, I ran this exact scenario yesterday against the VS Code telemetry.
I applied the mitigation, the refactoring is coming next week. :)
I'm interested in your point of view. If I run a query that tells me X hundred thousand users have used feature Y, have I violated anyone's privacy in your opinion?
Also, would you think it's better to not collect such non personally identifiable user information at the expense of quality and stability of product?
If I run a query that tells me X hundred thousand users have used feature Y, have I violated anyone's privacy in your opinion?
If you haven't asked them to specifically opt-in to data collection, then yes. And Microsoft does not ask for permission. There are some programs that do a very good job of asking before they send any crash or problem reports. Microsoft is not one of those companies.
non personally identifiable user information
No such animal.
at the expense of quality and stability of product?
One does not necessarily cause the other.
I'm not in the software field, so I'm sure your experience and mine are different. But I work for a multi-billion dollar healthcare company, and the legal department won't let us touch any sort of telemetry with a ten-foot pole. Somehow we're doing just fine, and have a huge satisfaction rate with our user interfaces, according to the studies that have been done for us.
For some products, yes, user shadowing, interviews and testing is enough.
But in the case of VS Code, I agree with the other commenters that you can benefit from both.
VS Code supports many languages, source control systems, workflows, external systems and extensions, and it's used by a very wide spectrum of users and developers. I can see why they believe telemetry is required to better understand how it's used.
They don't have to be mutually exclusive, do they? You can surely learn some things from large-scale telemetry collection that you can't learn from user studies (e.g., semi-representative "in the wild" performance metrics).
I am guessing the person may not have English as a first language and meant to say 'costs' instead of 'fees'. I am not sure which costs they would be talking about. Perhaps telemetry or the limitations they mention in the article.
It just says media contact. I am not clear if that means they actually wrote it or not?
At the top of the article it says Ottawa (which is where the headquarters of the Eclipse Foundation is located). There are a lot of French speakers around there so I assumed it was a French speaker who wrote it.
Regardless it seems like somebody at Eclipse should have reviewed the memo before it was released.
I was confused why the screenshot on the homepage (https://theia-ide.org/) looked so outrageously similar to VSCode, so I checked the source. It looks like the editor widget is Monaco (from VSCode) so the text editing experience is entirely based on VSCode and Theia provides an alternative for the surrounding IDE stuff.
Then they added a theme that imitates VSCode as much as possible to create the screenshot on the homepage, other instances like their example of Gitpod look less like VSCode.
Yeah... My first thought was, OK... they've just forked VS Code without really saying they did. Digging a bit it seemed that wasn't the case, but the marketing message that "this is VS Code just without Microsoft" would seem to be strong enough as to cause real marketplace confusion.
It's not really a fork. They reuse things like Monaco, but other than that they reimplement most things, like plugin compatibility. In fact, they started with an API and later implemented the same API as vscode. I'd say it's more like a clone.
I was very excited about theia because you could run it as a web server, meaning I could develop with a complete IDE (ideal for TypeScript development) from anywhere, without the code ever leaving a certain network.
This didn't work all that well when I tried it because it wasn't 100% compatible with vscode extensions yet (for example couldn't get vim keybindings), but I was able to use for a couple weeks during a trip and I got things done.
Now that vscode allows working over ssh and other solutions, I don't see a need for an alternative. I can work remotely with the exact same thing as from my main workstation.
The page admits that they think VS Code is great, so reused lots of its design and open source code it was based on. They also use the LSP, meaning many extensions should be easy to port.
This is basically a direct adoption of VS Code in the Eclipse context. I don’t see anything wrong here, they aren’t hiding their intentions and a lot of of them criticism here just seem to be projections of things they aren’t claiming.
We reengineered VS Code without altering the UX too much, because we love it as it is.
The problems we solved are:
- making it easier to adjust beyond the standard extension model, which is great for language support but rather limiting for product designers
- support browsers and on desktop (There is VSO but it is not open-source)
- do all this under a vendor neutral open-source governance
So in future I need different VSCode variants running because one project decides to use Theia and the other one is okay with VSCode?! Really great for the users :(
Seems Eclipse is doing what they are best at: Clutter things up. I don't see the big picture here.
Okay, they reuse parts from VSCode in true open source spirit and make claims like that.
> Theia 1.0 also has a marketplace that is available today and, in the spirit of true open source community, allows for even non-VS Code applications to use these extensions
What does that mean? Looked up and appears that IDE is built with extensions and you can use those APIs to customize IDE. + provides APIs from VSCode to maintain compatibility. Ok thats neat.
No comment on the authors other claims, but VSCode is not open source. "Code - OSS" is the open base upon which VSCode is built. VS Code's branding, telemetry and more are closed-source. See https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-1... for a full explanation.
So we talk the Installer, the brand/icon (which is good that it is strictly owned by one entity) and literally settings. These do not make the product less open source (I do not dare to use the term free). Linux is free software, however RedHat is not. You can do everything with the OSS version you can with the VS Code.
However, there are extensions delivered in the Brand VS Code (Remote Server SSH/Docker/WSL) which are closed source (which compete against Eclipse Che). And that makes since a bit muddy.
The closed-source nature of VSCode is a little more practically important than you make it out to be. It prevents Linux distros from including VSCode in their package managers (except non-free categories, usually disabled by default). And makes it impossible to patch VSCode, only "Code - OSS". Also, for normal users, the brand/icon is everything. If they go to their computer and "the chrome icon is blue", they will want the old icon back, if only because it's the one they know and trust.
You are distorting facts by calling VSCode open source. This [1] is the license for VSCode. It lets you "use any number of copies of the software to develop and test your applications, including deployment within your internal corporate network". The license implicitly (by omission) does not let you distribute binaries to your friends and colleges outside of your "corporate network". This is the defining characteristic of freeware. I am not a lawyer, that was not legal advice.
Your argument is akin to calling google chrome open-source. Yes, it is based on the open source chromium, but Chrome is decidedly not open-source.
On a more practical note, the fact that Microsoft does not distribute an open source build of VSCode is pretty annoying.
Agree to the annoying practical situations for the distributions. Unfortunately, a structural Linux problem. Is not that the old Firefox problem. They need to protect brand and reputation and cannot trust downstream packages.
Disagree with chrome comparison. Chrome adds tons of feature packages which are blobs or heavily proprietary stuff. VS Code does nothing of that. They add config settings and icons.
In regards of the open source built: Microsoft does that with .NET and it seems a pain. I mean, what is an open source build? A package different for 20 distributions with each 5 versions. Or a build script (which I hope they have :))
I'm not familiar with the history or the closed-source feature set of chrome. This [1] search result shows rather minor features compared to a browser - codecs, flash player, auto-update (I suppose this is a big deal on non-linux). VSCode, on the other hand has a proprietary Visual Studio Marketplace extension, (extra?) telemetry and an updater. [2] (I found a better link)
I actually only want an open source build for macOS and Windows - on Linux I almost exclusively use what is in the package manager. I just wish "Code - OSS" had a more recognizable name (and icon), like "VS Code OSS edition" (with a different color of the same logo) Code OSS is just impossible to search.
For adopters, i.e. organizations that want to invent something new on top of existing open-source code, there is a huge difference between the VS Code-kind of open-source where the project is still fully controlled by a single vendor and vendor neutral open-source. E.g. Kubernetes wouldn't be where it is if Google hadn't put it into a vendor neutral open-source foundation.
You can tell from the many adopters of Theia, that there is demand for this. You don't see such downstream products based on VS Code, because of the lack of vendor-neutrality and because it was not designed to be customizable (beyond extensions). Finally, the fact that you can develop your IDE once and run it in browsers and as desktop app is important, too. VS Code doesn't do that directly as VSO is private code.
I agree to that. That is a different intent than what vs code project has. And that is the fair right of a project/community.
PS: I think it is a pity that they prevent this. The branding and leadership alone will make VS Code the dominant player completely independent of what derived product ever be. The lack of open sourced vscode-server makes me really unhappy.
When I read it, it seemed like the decisionmaking for the software being under corporate control was their primary issue. VS Code will always be developed in a strategy aligned with Microsoft's interests.
Like for most modern open source. And that is usually a good thing. Even free software are not developed in public but under tight control of a group of persons. Just that we call them maintainers, do not pay them and their interest is usually glory or their own use instead of marketing of a cloud product.
There's a big difference between open source tools led by open source communities or individuals and open source tools led by Big Tech. Often the latter may decline features which are against the interests of the company, even if they're in the interests of all of the users.
While I agree with that you cannot push something against the goals of the company, but I argue there is no difference with most open source. Try get something new into the gnu tools. If you want to add a word count feature into ls. Might be a cool feature but the maintainer
Will say something like "nope" whatever argument you will bring because it violates their core goals.
While I don't plan to use it in the near futre, its good to have alternative because company agendas do change and less so in non-profit zone.
But, the major benefit IMO is this:
> We encourage VS Code extension developers to push their extensions to Open VSX in addition to Microsoft’s marketplace.” Open VSX is “an open-source implementation of a VS Code extension registry that we have developed under the umbrella of the Eclipse Foundation
This sounds like a nice thing to have and is usable ASAP. It will probably come with less potential restrictions (like political bans of developers on GitHub etc.)
Since no one else has brought this up, I think one of the big drivers behind this project is actually another eclipse project (che): https://www.eclipse.org/che/technology/
Che is a cloud ide that is supposed to be easily deployed into a k8s cluster. Che supports authentication and spinning up pods for projects, and other management features. Theia may have been developed to work nicely with Che directly (I am not a developer of either so this is only speculation).
I'm always surprised how little CHE gets talked about. Is there an alternative that has better traction? I tried it a few years ago and conceptually it was really ahead of its time in terms of spinning up a dev environment on the fly. Unfortunately the latest version, now based on k8s, was much more finicky to get setup in a home lab.
If this is intended to be a VSCode alternative, where are the download area? Why the strong emphasis on cloud? A version 1.0 with no package released? need top run it on docker?
I don't want to sound negative, I would really want to download it an try it... but from what I see in a quick glance, they want me to setup a whole cloud to use this, not how I envision an editor that is trying to take on the most popular editor nowadays
Theia is a platform to allow building desktop and browser IDEs, not a product in itself. You can use it through gitpod.io on any GitHub or GitLab project.
The strong emphasize on browser/cloud is because we believe we have finally built a browser-based IDE that is as good as the most popular desktop IDE (VS Code). Having solved that cloud based IDEs are going to be the normal in a couple of years and will naturally complete our devops pipelines.
They claim it's a framework for building domain-specific IDEs that uses the same extension framework and language server protocols developed by the VS team.
However VS Code already offers a desktop installer and runs in the cloud like VSOnline and CodeSandbox. And I'm not sure why a "neutral" extension marketplace matters because you can always download and install the extensions separately.
I tend to ignore what the Eclipse foundation is producing because of their poor development of the Eclipse IDE; they do have a point though when they mention true open source. VS Code is excellent, but is backed by a for profit enterprise, the same enterprise that now backs the Atom editor.
There are a number concerns pending when our development and infrastructure eco systems are open source but controlled by for profit entities.
Or perhaps there is no concern, let's type our code with VS Code, Stash it on Github, attend daily updates and video conference to discuss as a group on Team, and deploy on Azure.
The Visual Studio Code distribution from Microsoft is not open source. Code-OSS is open source and that is the vscode repository on GitHub. The relationship is very much like Chromium and Chrome.
Just that the out-of-the box Open Source VS Code is modified by roughly 5 configuration options (you guessed, telemetry urls), icons and a EULA before it is packaged by Microsoft.
I would not call that closed source. I call that redistributed with pre-configured settings. It is similar to what RedHat is doing to Linux and the GNU user space (if I am not wrong ;))
However, the extension market space, certain debuggers and certain VS Code branded extensions are a different story.
EDIT: OH WAIT - I see - they forked at least parts of Visual Studio Code and then open sourced it. In other words -- proving that Visual Studio Code is open source.
None of the code seems to be a fork Visual Studio Code is indeed not open source. If you grab, the binary from Microsoft it is slightly different than the code on the GitHub repository because Microsoft applies some Microsoft-specific things. The extension repo is closed source as well. It has long been a requested feature for open-source extension repository variants.
I'm an active user of both Eclipse CDT and VS Code. They both have a thing called "workspaces." VScode's hidden dirs are filled with JSON (so hot right now).
You mean the .vscode dir? Yeah, that typically contains 2 incredibly sparse , readable, and useful files... the same cannot be said for Eclipse workspaces in my experience.
I think the only way to beat vs code at this point is to implement IDE in a native language without GC. VSCode , eclipse etc can be very sluggish on large-ish projects, slow downs accumulate with code base size growth leading to usability problems, slow autocompletion etc.
I think part of the reason why VSCode is popular is because of how extensible it is. Also, the fact that it's built around JS makes it accessible to more people which means more extensions for example.
For some reason I'm able to find plugins for what I need in VSCode but not for Sublime :(
I really really like Sublime Text and own a license, but the lack of plugins or outdated one (only available for ST2?) makes it less than optimal for my daily driver
I was hoping Eclipse/Firefox would partner with Sublime Text/NotePad++. There is enough people on electron-based text editor with Atom & VSCode variant. I was hoping a different product needs to grow.
Yes, I know ST is closed-source. But as a user, I feel that its starting to hurt ST. I personally feel (not a pro-developer), ST is better than VSCode. ST is a better match for Firefox. I am hoping that the ST developer joins Mozilla.
Notepad++ has a eclipse-lite vibe. I was hoping eclipse could help Notepad++ reach linux & mac. But please dont put it in JVM, that is the original sin of Eclipse.
Haven't tried it myself but you can always go to the code and do it yourself :
I think the confusion here is that https://open-vsx.org/ requires github which is normal, they can require whatever they want you can even go in and add something else => https://github.com/eclipse/open-vsx.org
You write as if you're providing some additional information that debunks the criticism here, but you're not. Stop trying to strawman and re-contextualize the conversation.
open-vsx.org is billed as "a public registry for open-source VS Code extensions, accessible for everyone" and a "vendor-neutral" "alternative" to Microsoft's own registry. To be implemented in such a way that folks can only publish to it by logging in using an auth service run by the other registry operator amounts to a compromise at the existential level.
What are the problems with VSCode? I'm all for making alternatives if they are closed or you need to pay, but I believe Microsoft is doing a good service with all the regular and frequent updates to VSCode.
VS Code has a clear scope to be smart light-weight editor. It fits to mainstream needs indeed, but not for firms trying to build domain specific IDEs.
Theia does not have problems with VS Code. It embraces great tech and UX behind VS Code and makes it available to build custom products with ability to rebrand UI, get full control of developer experience, and so on.
There is no competition, but rather collaboration. So far Theia adopters were building own products by porting interesting tech from VS Code and contributing bug and feature requests back. Sometimes even by going and proposing fixes for them in VS Code.
I think they want to allow a non Microsoft branded version they can bundle with their software. So for example if you buy the ARM commercial compilers, this will come as the bundled code editor.
friendly reminder that while visual studio code is open source, the binary that you download from their website is not, and it's full of telemetry (and remember: telemetry ~= spyware).
consider using an alternative like eclipse theia or vs codium (https://vscodium.com/ - binaries built from the open source repositories)
So build it yourself? Like seriously are we really nitpicking over the installer and binaries now which the source is available for the actual product? It really feels like the industry is never happy if it has anything to do with microsoft.
I use vscode and I personally love it (I mostly use it for PHP and Go).
I read a lot of strong opinions and I'm curious to know how many have actually given Theia a try before complaining about it. :)
I used Eclipse for Java for several years, but not anymore... If they launched a lighter version, why not? Let's give it a try =P (just change the subject of the thread for a more decent and less appealing pls =P)
not even a download button, but aye they've released v1.0. Are they mad about VSCode telemetry ?
try installing it via git clone, they require an old version of node.
Attacking an open-source software to promote another open-source software. You needed to do better dear Eclipse Foundation. This isn't the philosophy behind open-source.
edit:
Wait. Is this an early April fools' day joke?
while vs is technically open source it's not free software. not only in the gnu sense but also the binaries are licensed different as the source code. You have to compile vs yourself to benefit from the licensing of the source code
The whole purpose of "open source" and "free software" is to allow modifications and ownership by the user. Both requires to compile on your own. So I would not call it a burden (as opposed to "benefit") but a consequence of being open source.
So we should consider the binaries as a branded favor of Microsoft for the lazy rest of us ;)
But why ? What is the point ?
There is already Visual Studio(free community edition equivalent to Professional Edition), Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ. Why waste more time and effort to re-invent the wheel ?
As OSS project, it will not be able to keep-up with changes to MSBuild and .NET
Intellij community is the open source IDE that has by far the most features.
So even if you can pay for the premium version, I would argue that jetbrains is in it's own league.
But it's not really cause its using parts of vscode on the backend to even function, so it really seems like their just trying to make it seem like more than it is, which is their cloud-editor project.
Wasted human resources and talents. Progress would be more prevalent if HRs were better allocated.
But they are indeed free to work on whatever they like even if I will not benefit from their work, sadly.
Not wasted. Those people will learn a lot of new things, right ?
Should work optimization be primary goal in this universe ? I guess not, or you will have hard time defending existence of movies, board/PC games, all sports, all baletristic writing etc. That is not very interesting place to be.
Responding a second time as HN seems to have missed the relevant part from that link:
> "When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a "clean" build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license (note, i made this commit to help make this more clear)."
The difference is trademark files (which are handled by copyright not software licenses) and settings (likewise these are not licensed). Almost exactly like Red Hat Linux compared to CentOS. See https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-1...
"...that enable developers, organizations, and vendors to create new, extensible solutions that avoid the fees associated with VS Code."
What fees are they talking about? VS Code is not my regular editor, but the whole thing seems to indicate confusion between "Visual Studio" and "Visual Studio Code". I am missing something or is the Eclipse Foundation really conflating the two?