this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 171 points 2 days ago (26 children)

A few things to point out:

  • Microsoft created this extension and pays money to develop it
  • Despite that, they give it to programmers for free. It is still free of charge.
  • They explicitly said that using it outside of their products is forbidden (according to article: at least 5 years ago), they just didn't enforce it
  • Someone (here: Cursor developers), despite that, used it in their products and started to make money from it

What exactly are you mad at? When will programming community finally understand that Microsoft is not a non-profit company and its primary purpose is to make money?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago (6 children)

The problem is that they're killing competition. Treating a company with the market dominance of Microsoft like a normal company would be fatal for humanity. Because they are eliminating innovation by Cursor and they do not need to do this to finance their own innovation. Effectively, humanity gets less innovation by Microsoft doing this.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well; companies used to get anti-trust laser canon'ed from orbit for less; but good luck with that in modern America

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I wholeheartedly agree that monopolistic practices should be nuked instantly, but I disagree that this was ever well enforced. Microsoft got away with murder in the 90's before they went to court and even then, feels like they got a slap on the wrist...

I think that this particular case is very far from that, but it does start to smell the same.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago

You should study about the trustbusting era of early 1900s. Then in the late 70s a new law reinforced antitrust legislation.

The issue is that the pendulum swings fast away from trustbusting and slowly back to it. Trustbusting creates economic development and prosperity, reducing public outcry for it, and capitalists yank the levers of government again towards monopoly building.

You mention the nineties, by even then Netscape successfully challenged Microsoft. But it was too little too late. The pendulum was already swinging back to monopoly, and it's reaching it's maximum in our days.

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