Sven, co-founder of Gitpod, here. I've published the message that Johannes, our CEO, shared earlier today with all our colleagues. It provides more details around this decision. https://www.gitpod.io/blog/building-for-the-long-run
Theia is a platform to allow building desktop and browser IDEs, not a product in itself. You can use it through gitpod.io on any GitHub or GitLab project.
The strong emphasize on browser/cloud is because we believe we have finally built a browser-based IDE that is as good as the most popular desktop IDE (VS Code). Having solved that cloud based IDEs are going to be the normal in a couple of years and will naturally complete our devops pipelines.
For adopters, i.e. organizations that want to invent something new on top of existing open-source code, there is a huge difference between the VS Code-kind of open-source where the project is still fully controlled by a single vendor and vendor neutral open-source. E.g. Kubernetes wouldn't be where it is if Google hadn't put it into a vendor neutral open-source foundation.
You can tell from the many adopters of Theia, that there is demand for this. You don't see such downstream products based on VS Code, because of the lack of vendor-neutrality and because it was not designed to be customizable (beyond extensions). Finally, the fact that you can develop your IDE once and run it in browsers and as desktop app is important, too. VS Code doesn't do that directly as VSO is private code.
We reengineered VS Code without altering the UX too much, because we love it as it is.
The problems we solved are:
- making it easier to adjust beyond the standard extension model, which is great for language support but rather limiting for product designers
- support browsers and on desktop (There is VSO but it is not open-source)
- do all this under a vendor neutral open-source governance
Gitpod is open-source at core. I.e. we made the IDE completely open-source (https://theia-ide.org). I didn't know replit is open-source. Can you share a pointer?
When we started the Theia project (theia-ide.org), we considered doing a large patch on VS Code as well. But we decided to go down a more sustainable approach by reusing the important building blocks from VS code (editor and vscode extension protocol) with stable APIs, because rebasing a large patch on a fast paced project is a PITA.
Theia is about to complete the VS Code extension support. At that point it will be the better option as it is architected to run in remote scenarios from the ground up.