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Comment by diaz | Hacker News Reader

Finally. It obviously is something that flies over the heads of most people here at least by reading the comments. This is great.

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I don’t personally see the need, but the fact that someone can do this should at least once and for all settle how “real” the open-sourceyness of VSCode is.

Some of us want to write code without shipping a bunch of usage data / telemetry / whatever back up to the Mothership.

It's the principle of the thing; and anything that shaves off a few clock cycles is fine by me.

VS Code already provides mechanisms to disable all background network activity.

Defaults matter. They matter even more given Microsoft's demonstrated history of quietly adding new telemetry and metrics which are enabled.

I have no skin in this particular game, but I'm glad to see the work being done.

Are you sure? This is what MS says about it:

Data Collection. The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft. Microsoft may use this information to provide services and improve our products and services. You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation.

https://code.visualstudio.com/license

You may need to wait for next week’s release. But it is made easy in the current insiders.

Microsoft is heavy into data-backed development right now. They're making decisions about were to put resources, and even what buttons to keep in toolbars, based on how many users are clicking them.

This seems to have lead to development of products and features that get a lot of excitement here on HN so maybe it's not all bad.

https://code.headmelted.com/ Has already done this but without extension support. Support for extensions requires adding content to the product.json beyond what the MIT licenses version contains. This content is traditionally proprietary, but the author of this repo managed to find an instance where it was mistakenly committed and is using that to justify it being MIT licensed now. Whether you agree with this is up to you I guess. I personally would object to using someone’s mistake to subvert their teams wishes.

And for either of these projects, I wouldn’t use their products without first verifying they are what they say they are. I’d do this by downloading the vscode repo and building directly from source then comparing. But at that point I have two of the same thing (hopefully), so not sure why this is needed in the first place.

Since apparently it’s going over a lot of heads (including mine), can you explain why this is important?

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