Summary: Another publicity stunt from Microsoft, this time going under the name ‘Visual Studio Code’, which is basically proprietary lock-in

DESPITE an openwashing campaign and an effort to deceive the public (as chronicled here before), Visual Studio is (and will remain) proprietary. There is currently yet another PR blitz from Microsoft, which at the moment is trying to openwash it and pretend that it's 'news' (it's not, it goes back to last year).

Sadly, some FOSS proponents have already fallen for it and Phoronix is doing marketing for Microsoft [1, 2]. This is not really news and it's not even a surprise. It's just some publicity stunt which got Microsoft boosters and Microsoft-friendly sites on board. There is a press release and a lot of what looks like 'prepared' coverage (ghost-written or written in advance with a so-called 'embargo') [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, , 12, 13, 14, 15, 16].

Microsoft may be good at marketing, even when it comes to proprietary software whose aim is to promote Microsoft APIs, i.e. Microsoft lock-in. ⬆