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Comment by mschuetz | Hacker News Reader

I'm not getting it, what part is not free? All the code is at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode under the MIT license and you can download a prebuild version, which is also free to use.

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VS Code binary is vscode plus custom package.json which configures telemetry, gallery, logo, etc. and therefor has a custom license. Similar to Chrome & Chromium, Oracle JDK & OpenJDK, Xamarin Studio & MonoDevelop, etc. [1]

Seems fair play to me.

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-1...

Great link, clear cut answer which ought to settle the whole question.

I was curious about what comprised the "etc." A little further down in the issue you linked, chrisdias said, "You can look at the product.json that is installed with the Visual Studio Code product to see what we configure."

I don't really know how to interpret this file, but the copy in VS Code 1.23.1 for Mac has 644 lines, compared to 23 in the repo.

It's 644 lines long because a lot of your post-install configuration is stored in there.

You'd want to compare a fresh install VSCode vs fresh install self build.

"Free" has unfortunately ambiguous meanings when it comes to software. The poster here isn't talking about the monetary sense; he's talking about "free" as in "free to do whatever you want with it". Microsoft stipulates things you can't do with the software, and it sounds like parts of the final product are even closed-source, similar to what Google does with Chrome vs Chromium. Except in that example, the distinction and the existence of the OSS version are much more clear and well-known.

We have an unambiguous term for that. It's FOSS.

Sure, but the author of the ticket just said "free", hence the confusion.

The complaint was that main site is advertising that VS Code is "Free. Open Source." which apparently is different from "Free and Open Source Software".

If you read the issue, the first few lines say:

> The main landing page https://code.visualstudio.com for Visual Studio Code currently does the following:

> it states the offered version is "Free. Open Source." which suggests free software to anyone who knows what the difference of "free" and "open-source" in the common word use is

> Below it immediately offers download buttons for something licensed under https://code.visualstudio.com/License/ which is absolutely not free software in any modern definition of the word.

for me it sounds more like legal ass covering than close sourcing vscode, so nobody can sue them for collecting telemetry or autoupdating, etc

Well that and the PR nightmare of people submitting pull requests to remove said telemetry code and then dominating the front page of hackernews / technology reddit / slashdot / what have you when MS closes the pull request. It's honestly quite a slimy brilliant thing they've done here.

I think I might be missing the sliminess here. MS invested time and money to build software and is offering it for free. As part of that offering they are bundling up the software to the point that you can just download it and run it. In exchange for this they want to be able to collect usage statistics so they know how their software is being used. They are also giving you the option to download the software from source and build it yourself if you don't want them to see how you are using the software. This all seems pretty fair to me.

Agreed. It doesn't seem any different to what, for example, Red Hat do with RHEL (which I also don't see the problem with).

Microsoft has a much darker past to come back from with this, so the stakes and expectations are much higher and community willingness to forgive much lower

The telemetry code (spyware) that is clearly in the binaries but missing from the MIT-licensed source code (people have already determined that the binaries don't match a build of the source code).

The telemetry usage is directly in the MIT source: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/f05063d13da8c6112ed...

The telemetry extension is open source too: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-extension-telemetry

And you can unpack the source for the distributed electron bundle yourself: https://medium.com/how-to-electron/how-to-get-source-code-of...

Then there is literally no reason for the license discrepancy

There is certainly A reason for the license discrepancy. It just may or may not be a good one.

The ticket is about “free” as in freedom. VS Code comes with a restrictive license agreement.

Specifically, the pre-built binaries that microsoft provides come with restrictive license agreements. The source code is still MIT.

There's presumably some difference between the Microsoft pre-builds and whatever you get from source. Apparently at the very least, the contents of product.json (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/product.json...) defining names are different.

License says you aren't allowed to attempt to derive or reverse engineer the source code. So basically the code is available, but if you look at it you are violating the license.

edit: binaries are under a restrictive license and code is not. So definitely don't use those binaries, as they are likely riddled with telemetry crap that isn't in the open source version.

That sounds like two legal departments did not talk to each other.

That restrictive license refers to the build, at best. The vscode source is under MIT at github, there is no need to reverse engineer the build and the license of the build won't affect the license of the source code.

I mean, even Mozilla doesn't let you release binaries with Firefox or Thunderbird branding. Gentoo can get away with it because you're building/using it locally, but when Debain wanted to place Firefox into their package build system, they had to rename it Ice Weasel.

That's not true. Mozilla did not want (even slightly) modified versions of Firefox or Thunderbird to be labelled as such.

The issue has been solved and, currently, Debian has renamed its package back to Firefox.

On top of it, this has probably nothing to do with this topic. (copyrights and branding being very different topics)

Hmmm. So the source is open and free. The compiled versions shall not be reversed. How can one validate that the compiled versions being provided are direct results of what's in the repo? Ie. Not a version with some bonus magic.

The chrome dev tools are right in there in vscode so you can take a look at what's executed. It's also hardly reverse engineering if the code is all there to look at, and even debuggable and modifyable at runtime. I fail to see any issues here.

good luck debugging and modifying the c++ code via the chrome dev tools.

You wouldn't need to since VSCode is written entirely in JavaScript/TypeScript.

Just because something is written in Javascript, doesn't mean it doesn't include a binary.

For example, sass-loader is/was dependent on node-sass which is a binary install. Lots of file utilities on NPM are similarly reliant on C code that may only compile on your machine correctly if you are lucky.

Building from code does come with at least one important issue: [0]

Although, upon looking at the history of the product.json file[1], it seems code to fulfill that requirement was once added to the open source version, and then quickly removed.

0: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-wiki/pull/30#issuecommen...

1: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/commits/master/product.j...

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