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Comment by laqq3 | Hacker News Reader

I read about this fact elsewhere also. Could you expand on this a bit? My impression was that VSCode and its associated extensions are open source, so I'm curious how Microsoft could make certain parts exclusive to its own build of VSCode.

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> I'm curious how Microsoft could make certain parts exclusive to its own build of VSCode.

By packaging it as an extension that isn't licensed like the rest of VSCode.

Also on a related note, if you're using an open source build of VSCode (such as VSCodium) then you cannot use marketplace.visualstudio.com/

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium#extensions-and-the-mark...

You absolutely CAN use marketplace.visualstudio.com, you just have to break ToS.

Because VSCode is under a permissive license (MIT) rather than a copyleft license (GPL), Microsoft can add any proprietary extensions it wants. "Permissive" licenses are only permissive for the creator and other developers (only sometimes), not for the end user.

Since MS is the author, they could put it under GPL and still do this. They own the copyright.

In order to contribute you have to sign away your rights, so it's only permissive to MS. It's a pervasive view on open source, cheered by sockpuppets, making people believe MS is now a open source company.

The situation is similar to Google Chrome/Chromium: Most of it is open-source, but the release binaries contain some proprietary bits for telemetry, marketplace access, etc.

A FOSS build is available at https://vscodium.com/

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