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How would you compare the three options,

- https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server

- https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia

I'm not sure if I'm reading it right, but the contributor graph looks like it's only 1-2 people working on each of the projects.

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The first two are forks that fundamentally did not change all that much, the latter aims to create a "true" opensource alternative of VSCode (including the ecosystem, where VSCodium falls flat) to serve as a common base for (and by) a few industry giants to build their next-gen of IDEs on top of (an "IDE framework", per their description).

As for the first two, last I checked openvscode-server was just enough to host VSCode for the browser, code-server had a few extras, like hosting at a subpath.

I hate to break it to you but that's a large percentage of open source projects. The high majority of code is by a low minority of people

I think this is because the barrier to meaningfully contribute is too high simply because large code bases are almost always complicated and hard to understand.

There's a few extraordinary exceptions (NetBSD source comes to mind) but they're extreme outliers

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