The Billion-Dollar Regret of Not Forking VSCode
Description
This meme uses the popular two-panel 'Putting on Clown Makeup' format to express a feeling of foolishness and missed opportunity in the software development world. In the first panel, a man is applying white face paint, the initial step in becoming a clown. In the second panel, he is shown in full clown attire, including a colorful wig and a red nose. The caption above reads, 'how i look for not forking vscode & making billions'. The joke is a self-deprecating take on the immense success of Visual Studio Code, an open-source code editor developed by Microsoft. The creator of the meme is humorously portraying themselves as a clown for not having the foresight to 'fork' (create a personal copy of) the open-source project and turn it into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, a common daydream among developers who witness open-source projects achieve massive commercial success
Comments
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Everyone thinks they could fork VS Code and make billions, until they see the pull request backlog and realize they'd need a multi-billion dollar company just to manage the incoming issues
Skipped the MIT-licensed VS Code fork because “no one pays for an editor,” now a startup just re-skinned it, toggled off telemetry, added SAML, and closed a $200 M Series C - meanwhile I’m the clown paying for seats
The real clowns are those of us who spent years contributing to VSCode extensions for free while someone else just slapped GPT-4 on a fork and got a $400M valuation. Next time Microsoft releases something under MIT, I'm forking it before the ink dries on the license
Ah yes, the classic founder's dilemma: spend years forking VSCode, battling Electron's memory leaks, implementing your own extension marketplace, and somehow convincing developers to abandon their perfectly configured setups with 47 extensions... or just accept that Microsoft already won the editor wars and focus on building something that doesn't already have 15 million daily active users. But sure, your fork with a slightly different color scheme and 'AI-powered' autocomplete will definitely be the one that disrupts the market. The rainbow wig really captures that Series A pitch energy
Senior lesson: the billion‑dollar architecture wasn’t microservices - it was git fork microsoft/vscode, change the logo, bind Ctrl+Enter to an LLM, and ship a pricing page
Forking VSCode? That's how you trade billions for eternal upstream merge hell
Amazing how the billion‑dollar moat ended up being: change productName in package.json, point autocomplete at an LLM endpoint, and add a billing page
i don't understand, can some1 clarify pls? Comment deleted
Cursor raised 900 million at 9 billion evaluation. Comment deleted
Cursor, windsurf, trae Comment deleted
vscode 2: vibe coding boogaloo Comment deleted
Because MS is sabotaging vscode forks. Tbf only the ones that bundle packages that have their own repos like the c++ linters and what not Comment deleted
Back when it was just VSCodium I was upset but now with cursor and the other forks it's deserved Comment deleted
VS Code Hannah Montana Edition Comment deleted
Although I'm pretty sure MS is not happy with this, is it? Comment deleted
Use AI to vibe-code a vscode fork for vibe-coding Comment deleted