I can definitely see where you're coming from. In fact, for VS Code, I believe they collect quite a bit of metrics on your usage of the product through telemetry, so it's definitely not "free" in the sense of "nothing given" - essentially, your programming and usage habits of the program are being sent to MS every second.
Re: the case of VS Code eliminating competition and MS losing the inventive to build good stuff, I think the core editor engine being open source gives me hope that this won't happen like in the olden days of MS. But of course, still a risk.
I can definitely see where you're coming from. In fact, for VS Code, I believe they collect quite a bit of metrics on your usage of the product through telemetry, so it's definitely not "free" in the sense of "nothing given" - essentially, your programming and usage habits of the program are being sent to MS every second.
Re: the case of VS Code eliminating competition and MS losing the inventive to build good stuff, I think the core editor engine being open source gives me hope that this won't happen like in the olden days of MS. But of course, still a risk.