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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

The model Microsoft is following here is called the "open core" model, where the core part of a product is open source, and then some extensions to it are proprietary. It's the same model that Chrome itself, that VSCodium is built upon, operates with. And also Android.

It's their choice fundamentally. They pay for all the VS code developers, so from a moral standpoint, they don't have to release source code at all (outside of general immorality of proprietary software but that's something different). They still decide to release it and IMO they should be lauded for open sourcing at least parts, and enabling DFSG-compatible rebuilds to exist.

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I interviewed with the VSCode team at Microsoft Zürich (didn't get the job because there were more senior candidates that already contributed to the open source repo, fair game). I have to say I'm super impressed that a small team in Switzerland managed to build and maintain it! Coming from that point of view it's imo totally okay that there are some proprietary parts. If it doesn't generate revenue in one way or another, we wouldn't have it. FOSS is cool and all but someone has to pay the devs eventually.

VSCode is the core component for Microsoft's GitHub Codespaces developer tools as a service cloud offering.

https://github.com/features/codespaces

Your comment seems to suggest VSCode is mostly developed by a small team in Switzerland. VSCode is also significantly developed in Redmond (at the Microsoft HQ near Seattle).

Yes, Redmond got involved later due to the immense success. Doesn't take anything away from the fact that the core is being developed by a small team in Switzerland.

> I have to say I'm super impressed that a small team in Switzerland managed to build and maintain it!

Well, there's two reasons I can think of it happened there [0] [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_F%C3%...

I studied at ETH Zürich and am Swiss. It still always surprises me how competitive we are as such a super small country.

The open core model is when a product is open source and extensions are paid and proprietary. The extensions often include features that are essential to the usage of said product.

There's nothing "open core" about Microsoft shipping binaries with telemetry.

Unless Microsoft views telemetry features to be an extension itself

Selling binaries is a something even GPL foresees. You can view telemetry as the price: if the product is free, you are the product. This has become a predominant business modell since most users seem unwilling to pay for sth that you can get for free. Sure MS won't need the money but I guess the dev team will probably have to still provide such kind of value. What would IMHO conflict with free software is however not the presence of telemetry but the lacking presence of it in the public sources (if that is true at all, often this even has to be removed by community forks). Is telemetry actually so intrasparent in the official sources?

> This has become a predominant business modell since most users seem unwilling to pay for sth that you can get for free.

I paid for my Android phone. Google is still collecting every piece of my life and my family's.

You paid for the physical hardware. You’re free to install AOSP on it if you’d like.

You bought the car. You're free to put whatever fuel in it that you like, but anything other than our own Super Xtreme CarFuel Plus is not supported (and will likely total your vehicle).

A bit more seriously: there are shades of grey. Just because they gave you something for what you paid doesn't mean it was a) fair, nor b) what was (effectively) advertised. Legalese around "you really just bought X" doesn't necessarily put everything in the clear.

i.e. when you buy an Android phone, it seems reasonable for people to expect that to come with a functioning Android-based OS. Just because you can install a different OS on it doesn't mean the default one isn't subject to criticism.

I see it something akin to the smart tv market where you buy the hardware but it also collects and uses data about everything you watch. The data collection aspect allows them to sell you that tv for less than they would if it were a "dumb" tv.

As far as I can tell, most people are not free to install AOSP on hardware they have paid for since the bootloader is locked.

Even those who purchase hardware where the bootloader can be unlocked, it takes much deeper technical knowledge to install a third party OS than, say, a third party OS on a PC. And that is assuming someone else built the OS for you.

Nobody is free to install AOSP unless you want to lose your warranty.

> The open core model is when a product is open source and extensions are paid and proprietary. The extensions often include features that are essential to the usage of said product.

Outside of the paid part, that's precisely what Microsoft is doing. MS publishes a couple of proprietary extensions for VS code.

That's not open core. You're not prevented from using those proprietary extensions, are you? Those extensions aren't "open source", they have nothing to do with VSCode being "open core".

We are. These extensions have light DRM and they only work on the original VSCode release, which you paid with telemetry for.

You're stretching what "paid with" means (just like with the meaning of "open core"). I'll step out of this conversation now.

Feel free to ignore me. But let me explain:

VSCode does not work at all for me without the "Remote SSH" extension. And the "Remote SSH" extension is proprietary and DRM-ed to be not work with the open source code.

I don't see how I'm stretching what "open core" means. This is just like any other open core stuff.

"Paid for" part, yeah you are right. I thought the orange site all agree I paid for Gmail, just not with money, but turns out I'm wrong.

I turn off all the telemetry in the VSCode settings. Are there switches I can’t turn off or something?

How can you know if the switches actually work?

I could check using a proxy or by inspecting the source (it’s just JavaScript) but I don’t actually care about it that much to bother and I think we would have heard something if the switches were bogus, given that VSCode telemetry is such a contentious issue. That’s why I asked if there was other telemetry without a switch, because Windows is like that.

Most of the extensions are open source and you can see the telemetry being collected, which is used to understand feature usage and diagnose bugs. The suggestion (with no evidence) that the telemetry is somehow insidious is FUD.

I don't totally agree with you on this. Telemetry on open source extension is public and opt-out, but it is neither on the MS VSCode builds or proprietary extensions. Additionally, I just can't believe that Microsoft uses telemetry data just for bug fixing, even without evidences, but that's only my opinion.

Right we've caught, let's see… {a thousand companies (including MS), governments around the word, and associated criminals} with their hand in the cookie-jar, over and over and over again, yet there's "no evidence." Billion-dollar databroker businesses non-withstanding. MS was first in line for the NSA as well.

I don't think all the telemetry is particularly useful, but there is no reason to give MS the benefit of the doubt here.

> There's nothing "open core" about Microsoft shipping binaries with telemetry.

I don't get what telemetry has to do with open source? It's entirely possible to ship a binary that is 100% "open source" - that is reproducible from OSS code - but still has telemetry.

>from a moral standpoint

I think you could more accurately call this a legal standpoint. I'm not convinced releasing closed source software is ever moral.

I was under the impression that VSCode originally had pieces of the open source licensed Atom editor, as well as other bits here and there. I haven't confirmed this to be 100% true, but I've seen articles like this

https://thenextweb.com/news/microsofts-cross-platform-visual...

If there is open source licensed code within VSCode, then they actually do need to release the source code, both from a moral and legal standpoint.

> If there is open source licensed code within VSCode, then they actually do need to release the source code, both from a moral and legal standpoint.

Atom appears to be MIT licensed, in which case they actually don't legally have to release anything.

The so-called Atom pieces are Electron, hence the similar name; it started as a component named Atom Shell. Also:

> If there is open source licensed code within VSCode, then they actually do need to release the source code

Only if the license requires it (which it doesn't), unless you think all permissive open source code should be viral and proprietary projects consuming permissive licenses should open anyway.

It could not be immoral to follow the open core model but it is absolutely immoral to trick users to think that the binary they are downloading is open source when in fact is proprietary.

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