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Comment by aniforprez | Hacker News Reader

You're conflating LSP and VSCode. LSP is a completely open spec for things like autocomplete, syntax highlighting, symbol searching and so on. Any editor can use any LSP server and jetbrains is using it for new languages in their editors and fleet

VSCode is also completely open source. The only thing not "open" about it is the keys they use to make the final distributable. Even the VSCodium docs say as much. They literally just build the final distribution but with slightly different keys to point to their open source extension distribution website instead of the Microsoft one

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On a surface level, this is true. Vast majority of the code that makes VS Code is MIT licensed.

But the configuration of what marketplace is used and what extensions have access to the privileged "proposed API" makes huge difference in what Microsoft/GitHub can provide as user experience and what other developers can do.

See this great post for detailed explanation how Microsoft created a closed ecosystem around VS Code https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32657709

I understand the difference in UX but I'm really not concerned with that. The code itself is all open source for the VSCode client and will probably remain that way. Extensions like Pylance are replaceable and the Python extension can already just use Jedi instead. Also I'm sorry but that article is really terrible in terms of both content and layout. In terms of content, its only real argument is the .Net fiasco and some issue with Gitpod that really doesn't matter. In terms of content, the page is utterly unreadable

I'm perfectly aware of what Microsoft could do in some distant future. But as is, for all intents and purposes, VSCode is open source

> But as is, for all intents and purposes, VSCode is open source

... Except that if you use the source to make your own build, you lose the extension ecosystem that is one of VSC's major selling points. It is at best a worked example of tivoization.

The extensions are compatible, aren't they?

    rm -fr ~/.vscode/*
    cp -a ~/.vscode-oss/* ~/.vscode/
    # Run VS Code, download extensions
    cp -a ~/.vscode/* ~/.vscode-oss/

Based on my recollection of migrating to VSCodium, all my extensions continued to work just fine.

I think there's also a hacky way to let VSCodium access the VS Code extension marketplace, but I believe it's an EULA violation.

You can easily just download the extension dist files and dump it in the extensions folder. Most extensions are open source too and VScode is not doing anything special with the extension files. They're mostly just JS. You lose out on the convenience of the marketplace but the open source version exists. If a maintainer doesn't have their extension on there, usually reaching out to them will have them upload it there too or as I mentioned, just clone the repo

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