True, slap a price on it. I'm sure people here get enough utility out of VSCode to pay for it.
The problem is when the free offering is actually designed to ensnare you in a tarpit of legal liability and uncapped financial liability. Especially with a service like VSCode where it's not a single purchase and you rely on Microsoft indefinitely (through extensions and updates). But it's designed that way. There's no other option. They chose to not make it simple to avoid a single clean payment, and extract longer term money of ambiguous amount based on user resistance.
I paid for jetbrains stuff for many years because it was worth it. And compared to eclipses features et it was leagues above.
That's worth money.
Like I always say about open source. I'm skeptical about adapting frameworks without big money behind them... Because relying on the whims of random internet amazing engineer is a risk.
MS will make money on vscode. Just like Google makes money on Chrome. Just not directly.
A marvel of engineering, really? In find using bloated browser tech and napkin-designed language to build a barely functional IDE as "impressive" as building a mile-long pedestrian bridge using Popsicle sticks and chewing gum.
To be fair, a (stable, used by many for many years) mile-long pedestrian bridge constructed out of popsicle sticks and chewing gum would be a fairly impressive feat.
I'll take browser tech + JS based IDE over a streamlined ASM based one that updates at a glacial pace any day. Which is why there aren't really any other great options, traditional IDEs can't keep up. Even MS' own original visual studio product - there's no point to it anymore.
What is the nature up these updates you're speaking of? The core of the IDE is the editor and a plugin system. Editors are pretty much a solved problem, some people still swear by 40 year old vi and that doesn't seem to make them less employable. Drawing to a GUI instead of a console isn't much of a challenge nowadays either. Whatever updates are required will be for the plugins, and that's not technology specific; Delphi (25+ years ago!), Eclipse and IntelliJ all have that. Visual Studio or XCode painting themselves in a corner by being so rigid is no excuse for using the mushiest language to control the most abstracted platform to design a new IDE.
VS code is decent, all rounder, free, open enough to be forked.
And people forget that it's marvel of engineering. Go look through code. That doesn't get produced for free.
Microsoft or any company owes nothing for free to anyone whatsoever. This entitlement syndrome needs to be in check.