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Copilot Chat Goes MIT — Microsoft Reminds Everyone Who Built the IDE
In a bold move against Cursor and Windsurf, Microsoft has open-sourced Copilot Chat, the AI assistant for VSCode. While Windsurf and Cursor are built on VSCode’s open foundation, both remain closed themselves
The fierce competition between Cursor, Windsurf and VSCode moves to the next stage. As Microsoft announced before, just now, Copilot Chat became open source.
People expecting whole Copilot system to become open source may be dissapointed about it. But in fact, this release is actually more important for Microsoft than anything else at this moment.
As we know, Windsurf and Cursor are built on top of open source codebase of VSCode from Microsoft, and they got some competitive advantage while VSCode seemed to have hard time to catch up.
So you may wonder why on Earth, Microsoft releases another chunk of it’s app into open source world, while Cursor is still out there closed sourced? I won’t mention Windsurf, because Microsoft is a major partner and investor into OpenAI, and since May 6, 2025, OpenAI is in a process of being acquired by OpenAI.
