VS Code wouldn’t have won the mid-2010s editor wars if it was closed source (note that VS Code has not helped MS ramp people up to VS itself). The winner of that war was always going to be an open source editor, it was just Microsoft whose concept won out. Closed source editors like Coda failed to gain traction and even Sublime Text fell eventually.
If MS ever decided to discontinue VS Code or relicense it, there would be blood in the water. I guarantee you there would be multiple compelling competitors in under a year and probably a new open source winner with consolidation in 5.
So to answer your question: they would be forking Atom (which I think would’ve won otherwise).
> So to answer your question: they would be forking Atom (which I think would’ve won otherwise).
Atom was far slower than VS Code, despite both of them being built on Electron. I wouldn't have used Atom, but I use VS Code.
It is entirely possible that some other closed-source editor with a superior package/extension system would have won, or the "war" would have been postponed until Rust was ready enough for Zed to come along.
Sublime Text fell because VS Code was just better, not because it was closed source. I switched from Sublime Text to VS Code, and didn't care one bit how open or close either was.
Not saying there aren't people who care, there are, but they are a small minority.
VS Code only got better because it was open source though, the community contributed so much. Sublime Text was vastly superior in the beginning in pretty much every way.
Zed's not a VSCode clone, and it's fantastic and OSS. They don't really have a business model that I see working though, IMO. I pay them purely because I love the editor, but the editor is free. The AI integration is what you pay for, but I just run claude code in a terminal.
every AI lab have cli for agent coding. you don't need VS Code. if you want coding agent to write code for you just use cli then use any IDE, text editor or whatever you prefer to review, edit or write code.
There was a time that Eclipse was my preferred editor. It was free and it gave cool sexy features that all the cool kids who could afford Visual Studio had, and it worked on Linux!
Nowadays I'm basically a Neovim purist, but I have positive memories of it. I'm kind of afraid to revisit it at this point, though, since everyone hates on it and I suspect I wouldn't like it as much.
Did you consider IntelliJ, even just the community edition?
If not you really should. IntelliJ with Java is one of the best dev experiences I've ever had. I'm a VSCode fan for most other things but for Java I wouldn't even remotely consider using it over IntelliJ if I had the option :-)
Still curious which ones will survive when the AI gold diggers finally settle.