Despite its easy integration with WSL, in October 2021 Visual Studio Code became the site of a battleground between Microsoft and the open source community. The controversy centred around the release of .NET 6. The tech giant had originally hinted it would include a feature to allow developers to modify source code while an app is running and immediately see the results.
Microsoft provoked a backlash due to its lastminute decision to include this feature in Visual Studio only – a paid product primarily designed to run on Windows. Ultimately, Microsoft bowed to pressure from both the open source community and its own employees to grant a pull request to enable this feature with VS Code, but events like these beg the question: can a commercial company like Microsoft ever fully embrace open source?
Microsoft opens up
During the late ’90s,
