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.