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Comment by alfiedotwtf | Hacker News Reader

Long term risk management!

99% of my time in front of the computer is spent in an editor (for both work and play). Having invested and continuing to invest so much time and effort in my tools and my environment, I would hate for something so fundamental in my life to not be free as in freedom:

    "Microsoft's releases of Visual Studio Code are licensed
     under this not-FLOSS license and contain telemetry/tracking"

    https://code.visualstudio.com/license

By choosing open source, you can reduce the amount of carpet pulled out from under you.

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Which is why I use vscodium.

It's better than using the MS builds but the SSH remote extension, python's new LSP ( Pylance ) and certainly few other plugins beside being close source don't even work with the open source builds of Vscode. ( + You don't have access to bunch of plugins if you don't manually edit your config to use Microsoft's store, which maybe against its licensing ).

If tomorrow Microsoft decided that some new versions of essential extensions should follow the same path VsCodium would basically become useless, I wouldn't trust Microsoft that easily.

Good points. I wasn't aware of these since my base VSCodium environment is quite minimal, but this definitely makes sense.

Noting that the point it not just avoiding telemetry, but actually having a tool as indispensable as your text editor not at the mercy of Microsoft whims.

Centralized control under any corporation, especially MS, is a different concern from the project "not being open source" which is what the comment I replied to was talking about.

But yes, it is a valid concern for sure.

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