It has a proprietary license[0]. That makes it a non-starter. Too bad: it looks nifty!
> The software is licensed, not sold. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you will not (and have no right to):[…] d) use the software for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities
Oops. Better not install this on your work laptop!
[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-ossdata.vscode...
Dev on the project here - I'll mention that this language is due to corporate boilerplate public preview licensing. It is absolutely available and encouraged for use in commercial etc. activities. The licensing language needs to be fixed.
That's good to know! Right now it's pretty much illegal for anyone to use it in the situations most people would want to use it for. Any idea what the eventual license will be?
We're working the details out right now, but the change will make it clear that the extension has a free license without restrictions. Stay tuned!
You're a dev on the project and consider yourself authorized to speak on behalf of the project, on a legal matter, on Hacker News.
Are you authorized to do the same on a blog hosted on microsoft.com? A lot of people would treat that as authoritative even if bigger enterprises will wait for the shrink-wrap to be updated.
Solid point. That would be a "promissory estoppel" defense if MS changed their mind and decided to run amok with this.
Good: "Your honor, here's a copy of their official blog where they said the license terms are a temporary glitch but that we're fully allowed and encouraged to use the product."
Not good: "Your honor, an anonymous new account on Hacker News said it's totally fine to use this even though the license forbids it."
I'd cheerfully take my chances with the former. The latter? Not so much.
(As mentioned elsewhere, I don't for a second think MS is going to track me down and sue me for using this against the terms of the license. I'd feel a whole lot better if someone officially put that in writing, though.)
Not an MS fan, but you guys rock for making VS Code, really changed software development for me. Especially combined with good language servers (Redhat for Java, intelliphense for PHP, Clangd for C/C++, and some python stuff). Yay! Sure, Eclipse could do it, but things like search, which I do a 1000 times a day, really benefits from good UI design choices. It simply speeds up the work massively.
Right on. I'll keep an eye out for it!
We've updated the license, thanks for the patience: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-ossdata.vscode...
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Please don't harangue new users as soon as they show up to HN. Whatever legitimate point you have is drowned out by the atmosphere of hostility you create.
Not only that but it damages the reputation of this community.
You (<-- I don't mean you personally, but all of us) should be welcoming to new users and assume good faith, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). There's no reason why you can't make your substantive points while doing so. (Edit: you needn't look far for a good example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074135.)
It might also be good to remember that everyone makes mistakes, that project launches don't always go perfectly, and that HN is for discussing the interesting aspects of a submission.
I didn't mean it to be haranguing, but OP was giving what amounted to legal advice that was actually wrong and dangerous. I do think that needs to be called out and clarified—not as a personal attack on OP but just as a matter of safety for readers.
I'll acknowledge that kstrauser may have done a better job of sounding friendly about it, but I don't think my question was out of line nor even particularly aggressive given the circumstances.
I'm sorry to press the point, but I don't think you're correctly assessing the impact of comments like your GP post, especially on a legit new user like lossyrob.
You may not have meant to be haranguing, but intent doesn't communicate itself—at least not in the tiny textblobs which are all we have here. It has to be included in the message.
When I look at your comment from that point of view, I notice that it leads with a hostile personal trope ("You do recognize...?"), followed by a putdown of everything this team is probably hoping for ("no one should use this"), followed by a personal attack ("you shouldn't be encouraging"), followed by a pedantic hammer-blow ("legally the license is the license") that takes the spotlight away from anything new or exciting about their work. That is followed by a sentence that basically shames them for what was obviously just an oversight. How is a newcomer (or anyone, for that matter) supposed to feel when they encounter that?
You're a good HN member and I'm sure you didn't intend to condemn or humiliate anyone. The problem is that people routinely underestimate the provocation in their own comments and overestimate the provocation in others'. If the error is 10x in each direction, that's a huge skew [1]. That's why it's hard to track the impact that one's posts have—especially the righteously indignant sort of post [2].
I suppose one of the moderators' jobs is to step in and try to articulate that explicitly, in the hope of persuading enough users to generate a bit of a system correction.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] which, by the way, I can feel a bit of in my own comment just now, and I'm probably underestimating it too.
OP was giving what amounted to legal advice
That is a huge overstatement that you can't really use to justify the haranguing. They just popped in to address the potential issue and let people know they're trying to sort it out. Nobody is giving legal advice and nobody is going to end up in legal trouble because Microsoft messed up their license boilerplate for a bit.
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"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Huh, I'm not sure I said anything like the above.
It's in the same general space, no?
If it helps at all, there's also this: "Assume good faith" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not to belabor the point too much, but assuming good faith is different from trusting anonymous advice from people claiming to be official advocates that could do real damage to your company if legal wanted to bone you.
Yes they are a new user, but they appear to have made the account just to make that comment.
but they appear to have made the account just to make that comment
People making accounts so they can talk about their work is one of the best reasons for people to make an account and a big part of what makes HN threads interesting.
people claiming to be official advocates that could do real damage to your company if legal wanted to bone you.
That seems like the opposite of assuming good faith.
> People making accounts so they can talk about their work is one of the best reasons for people to make an account and a big part of what makes HN threads interesting.
Uhuh but coming in to give bad legal advice as your first comment for the benefit of the largest most litigious corp on the planet, is that what makes HN threads interesting?
> That seems like the opposite of assuming good faith.
That wasn't a statement towards the individual. That was a statement of what could befall someone who took their advice.
It's not legal advice. People can just be wrong and you can tell them you think that without coming off as a jerk.
That wasn't a statement towards the individual. That was a statement of what could befall someone who took their advice.
No, I don't think that's true - it's just a catastrophizing rationalization for reflexive dickishness. We all suffer from reflexive dickishness so of course it happens and it's not that big of a deal but trying to pass it off as some sort of virtue is a mistake.
Can't use it for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities? Uh, this actually seems insane to me? What is it for then?
> Can't use it for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities? Uh, this actually seems insane to me? What is it for then?
Its a public preview, for which Microsoft probably does not wish to accept non-disclaimable liabilities for defects when used in those circumstances.
It is for previewing. By people who are interested in what is in the pipeline for a more general release.
> non-disclaimable liabilities
So you are saying that MIT/ISC/GPL/Apache2 and all the other OSS licenses do open you up to liabilites?
I am saying being a merchant in the field of software and supply software opens you up to liabilities, and saying “Not my responsibility” does not, in most jurisdictions, actially completely shield you from all of them, correct.
This may also, to a lesser extent, be true of people who are not merchants in the field of the product supplied.
It’s not the license creating the liability, in either case.
So you are saying that the parts of for example MIT or similar licenses that in clear terms say:
"THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."
do not constitute something that frees you from those liabilities?
Cause if so I think basically most of open-source would just shut down tomorrow.
I'm with you on this one. Consider all the GPL'ed software that IBM distributes via Red Hat.
This doesn't make sense to me. They could just say the software is provided as-is and Microsoft holds no liability. Which they do say elsewhere. This license goes much farther to say Microsoft can sue you if you use it.
> This doesn't make sense to me. They could just say the software is provided as-is and Microsoft holds no liability.
You cannot effectively disclaim certain liability for uses of a product you supply, even with an as-is presentation (exactly what liability depends on jurisdiction and often other context). Merely claiming to have no liability does not make it so (what it will usually do is disclaim all yhe liability you can disclaim, except for particular liabilities that may require separate explicit specific waivers to be effective.)
OTOH, if the product you provide is a software license that doesn't cover specific uses, using the software for the excluded uses may not be seen as a use of the product provided at all, and may not trigger the non-disclaimable liabilities, and even it doesn't avoid those liabilities, in the event someone sues over them, it also enabled the product supplier to countersue for infringement damages and mitigate the liabilities.
My initial reaction is "entrapment".
Edit: That's uncharitable of me. I strongly doubt that's the plan. But it genuinely was the first thing that came to mind.
I'm sure these restrictions will lift once it's out of preview. They have a huge Postgres hosting business in Azure that couldn't benefit from this if it's restricted to non-commercial.
I assume that restriction is due to the public preview status. But yeah MS really ought to at least allow businesses to evaluate it for potential subsequent use after preview.
> PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE. The software is a pre-release version. It may not operate correctly. It may be different from the commercially released version.
The license has been updated to remove this restrictive language: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-ossdata.vscode...
Probably a copypasta mistake?
Why would they spend money into this extension if 99% of developers can't use it?
Because most people will use it without reading the license, giving them the upper hand when they might needed it? Might sound a but harsh, but we're talking about Microsoft.
Is there a single example of MS doing something like this in the last 10 years?
VS Code forks like Cursor that use their extensions?
Maybe, but darned if I'm going to be the one to take the legal risk of installing it.
I'm willing to put good money that MS is not going to sue anyone for using this
I am extremely doubtful that they would. And yet, using it under that license is taking the legal risk that they'll act kindly even though they have the right, under the license, to be jerks about it.
Is MS going to be a jerk about it? Almost certainly not. Could they if they wanted to? Sure seems like it.
I worry that with the threat of Cursor this will be more common now. Microsoft's business interest will prevent them from funding development work that directly benefit the popular forks (for years they probably assumed no fork could ever gain traction...).
I notice your very important post, arguably the most important, has been buried under piles of fawning. Were you downvoted from a higher score?
does anyone actually think like this?
Anyone who works in risk management and/or threat modeling for a living does.
thats such a small percentage of people
There aren't that many doctors, either, as a percentage of the population, but if they tell you not to eat paint, you might consider their opinion.
I go further than that and say screw Microsoft's partially open source stuff. Because VS Code isn't fully FOSS, which is a bit weird, isn't it.
Are you insinuating that the way the majority thinks is more correct and should be preferred?