VSCodium: 100% Open Source Version of vs. Code | Hacker News Reader

VSCodium: 100% Open Source Version of vs. Code

itsfoss.com

57 pointsazhenley8 comments

I prefer to help improve Microsoft's products and services better.

...said nobody

I've used it for a few months now. The icon is great. I've had much less glitchiness and crashes than I had with standard VS Code (this is on Ubuntu 18.04). Really makes you wonder how many random crashes/glitches are due to poorly coded telemetry.

Zero for me and I've been using Code for ages.

Literally zero.

Before I would mainly get this one where the File > New Window menu item would simply crash the running instance of vscode 1/5th of the time.

Same here, Code is simply one of Microsoft's best made products.

So, basically the version we download to install is actually the open-sourced version + Telemetry, with an option to disable the telemetry.

For the privacy-conscious or Microsoft distrusting folks, you can either build from source or just install VSCodium.

Have I got it?

The binary they (microsoft) provide is under a different, proprietary license and contains code that we cannot see that is not open source. When pressed on the issue, they say it is for "patent concerns" which is laughable for obvious reasons. The deeper you dig on this, the sketchier Microsoft's stance seems.

There were a lot of pissed off people on their github about a year ago basically demanding that they fix this discrepancy, but they did not bow to the pressure whereas in other cases (i.e. being urged by the OSS community to rename GVFS) they do bow to such pressure, which raises the question why is this so important to them when the entire point of vscode is to have good PR in the OSS and developer communities.

Long story short, whatever they are putting in that binary that isn't in the OSS version, they really, really don't want to take out. But I bet at the end of the day it's for some boring beuracratic reason rather than something sinister.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com