Embrace.

Extend.

Extinguish. Extract rent now that everyone lives in / depends on your proprietary ecosystem.

I'd say they can't keep getting away with it!, but history shows they clearly can.

Literally monopolist strategy 101.

One that's worked for Microsoft many times before (docx, for example). Its their favorite loophole.

But Microsoft developed it in the first place. It's perfectly within their rights to pull it and developers making money off of their work isn't bad either. I love a good pitchfork to corporate, but this is honestly fine.

The problem is that they’re killing competition.

So, they pay to develop a product, for themselves, explicitly says "it's only for us, shoo shoo", and when they decide that their product, that they pay for, and provide for free to their user, should not be used by other, it kills the competition that did not do anything except take the product for free despite being told not to?

I'm not on the side of Microsoft for most things. But if doing nothing but taking someone else's free product qualifies to be competition that should be protected, we're having problems.

Honestly moving to clangd has got to be the single best thing I've done in C++, it's cross platform and I've found it to be significantly faster, more reliable, and more featureful than Microsoft's C++ plugin by a long shot

Clang is a better C++ compiler than msvc, it generates faster binaries and can compile complex code that msvc errs on at least in my experience YMMV.

I wish there was a GCC equivalent; but even if clang is a corpowhore project it's atleast OSS

How dare people choose their own software? Don't they know theyre supposed to let you choose it for them?

Better tools such as...?