Anil DashIn roughly the past half-decade, Microsoft went from nowhere to overwhelming dominance of text editors with VSCode, ownership of majority of code hosting (and open source dev) with GitHub, ownership of the dependency stack used by most devs with npm, control over the most popular single language with TypeScript, and is trying to position copilot and ChatGPT as inevitable parts of the future dev process. Nothing negative for the ecosystem will come of this, as the last half century teaches us.
Michael Engard@anildash It’s so frustrating, because I genuinely love a whole bunch of those tools—I practically live in VS Code—but I can’t ignore the little voice in my head that knows they’ll all betray me sooner or later.
Dave Lane 
🇳🇿@lightweight @anildash I mean, I’ve also got a MacBook and an iPhone. And a Visa credit card and Amazon Prime. I’d love to live life without any toxic corporate relationships, but it’s easier said than done. I feel like the trick is knowing which mass systems collapses are worth anticipating and preparing for.
LisPi@michael @lightweight @anildash Yeah, this issue is one of the things @pluralistic has written quite a bit about.
In my country, refusing to work with any Microsoft-derived technology in IT will basically remove >70% of jobs, right from the get-go.
We did get some good things out of M$'s laziness though, like the #LSP & #DAP #OpenStandard #protocols, which work just fine in #Emacs (why VSC when you have Emacs?) and have greatly improved its ability to be used for #Java among other languages.
@lispi314 @michael @anildash @pluralistic an obvious Microsoft dependence makes it easy to eliminate bad employment prospects... I quit my first role (as a research scientist) because they were planning to make me switch from Linux to Windows. That was in 1998. Left and started my own 100% #FOSS business. Sold that in 2012. Never used MSFT since I swore I'd never use it again (used MSO for my Masters thesis in Seattle, 1994). Haven't regretted MS' absence from my life one bit.
@lightweight @michael @anildash @pluralistic Most employers being bad employers makes for some bleak prospects, but successful entrepreneurship tends to require skills, dispositions and ideas I don't really have.
A fully FOSS setup producing nothing closed-source means a *lot* of customer-facing consultancy (and lots of effort to even get customers), which has burned me in very unpleasant ways in the past. Having that be my main work instead of dev doesn't sound like much of an improvement.
@lispi314 @michael @anildash @pluralistic I'm not sure that it necessarily follows that if it's #FOSS, it needs a lot of customer consultancy. In our shop, we prided ourselves in the fact that each of our dev team could happily talk to customers (usually phone, in those days), but few did so often. Most just worked hard coding. It's certainly possible, but FOSS doesn't have some of the customer-hostile (but profitable) attributes of proprietary development. (see https://davelane.nz/proprietary)