I guess, but LSP has been a huge boon to every single code editor that isn't already developed by a for-profit company.
"Hybrid-source" has already existed in pretty much every plugin ecosystem for a closed-source product ever (e.g. JetBrains, Sublime Text, Google Chrome, et multa alia) other than the Microsoft Office suite (where people sell proprietary plugins for $50).
> close down all the good parts of the IDE and open-source the bare minimum client-side functionality.
This is still a material improvement over closing down all the good parts of the IDE and not open-sourcing the bare minimum client-side functionality!
The hardest part by far is the "bare minimum", turning the NxM problem into an N+M problem. That was always the original selling point of LSP.
And language servers (even and including the source-available ones developed by Microsoft) tend to be a lot more than "bare minimum" anyway. So Pylance (whatever that actually is) is closed-source, but Pyright and Debugpy are excellent tools and are open-source.
Yes, Microsoft has made a good strategic maneuver here. Their obvious ploy is to garner general goodwill, launder their well-deserved filthy reputation, and establish themselves as the go-to company for software developer tooling, which will hopefully translate into juicy enterprise sales as well as lots of telemetry and platform lock-in for later value extraction, not to mention free bugtesting & developer contributions from the public.
But let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Don't forget that they are investing heavily in something that benefits the entire ecosystem. By open-sourcing the most important core elements, they have left the door open for people to fork and redistribute their software if and when they try to go for an EEE maneuver.
The only thing that makes me a little squeamish about LSP is that the protocol itself is controlled by Microsoft and I guess also Sourcegraph. But even then, the community can easily tell Microsoft to go fuck themselves if they try to pull off something like what Google is doing with its Manifest v3.
"Hybrid-source" has already existed in pretty much every plugin ecosystem for a closed-source product ever (e.g. JetBrains, Sublime Text, Google Chrome, et multa alia) other than the Microsoft Office suite (where people sell proprietary plugins for $50).
> close down all the good parts of the IDE and open-source the bare minimum client-side functionality.
This is still a material improvement over closing down all the good parts of the IDE and not open-sourcing the bare minimum client-side functionality!
The hardest part by far is the "bare minimum", turning the NxM problem into an N+M problem. That was always the original selling point of LSP.
And language servers (even and including the source-available ones developed by Microsoft) tend to be a lot more than "bare minimum" anyway. So Pylance (whatever that actually is) is closed-source, but Pyright and Debugpy are excellent tools and are open-source.
Yes, Microsoft has made a good strategic maneuver here. Their obvious ploy is to garner general goodwill, launder their well-deserved filthy reputation, and establish themselves as the go-to company for software developer tooling, which will hopefully translate into juicy enterprise sales as well as lots of telemetry and platform lock-in for later value extraction, not to mention free bugtesting & developer contributions from the public.
But let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Don't forget that they are investing heavily in something that benefits the entire ecosystem. By open-sourcing the most important core elements, they have left the door open for people to fork and redistribute their software if and when they try to go for an EEE maneuver.
The only thing that makes me a little squeamish about LSP is that the protocol itself is controlled by Microsoft and I guess also Sourcegraph. But even then, the community can easily tell Microsoft to go fuck themselves if they try to pull off something like what Google is doing with its Manifest v3.