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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

What's the problem for people who just use VSCode, exactly? The software still does what people want for free, which is what 99% of VS Code users use the software for anyway. People who care about open source-ness have their own extensions to replace their proprietary C++ tooling, or they can use an open source alternative like Eclipse.

I remember when basic features that come for free in VS Code cost thousands of dollars per developer, back when "update" meant "buy the new version (again)". I swear, people forgot how good they have it.

The change that made the Microsoft addon incompatible with VS Code forks happened four years ago.

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For people who see VS Code as just a decent gratis text editor, there's no problem.

For people who care, to some degree, about using an open source tool, for whom the marketing that VS Code is open source played a role in their choice of using it, it should matter. And it matters that other projects (think Platform IO and more) choose VS Code as a platform to build on top of, and they get away with it because "it's open source".

Then people should stop caring about open source, care about free software instead, and do not forget that it is free-as-in-freedom, so they should still pay for their tools.

Otherwise keep hoping that your corporate or VC funded SaaS "disruptor" master will continue to be nice to you

But VS Code is not even open source, so even people who only care about open source should be worried about using VS Code.

I feel like comments lately have become full of false statements.

VSCode is MIT licensed. But the extensions aren't, which locks you into the Microsoft distribution of VSCode. And that's how they turned an open source product into a monopoly-enhancing tool.

I agree, lots of false statements here. "Code - OSS" is open source, and released under the MIT license. Visual Studio Code is built by combining "Code - OSS" with proprietary code, and is released under the following non-open-source license: https://code.visualstudio.com/license

From their github repo:

    Visual Studio Code is a distribution of the
    Code - OSS repository with Microsoft-specific
    customizations released under a traditional
    Microsoft product license.

"Visual Studio Code" is to "Code - OSS" what Google Chrome is to Chromium. Microsoft has just been successful at tricking people into thinking that Visual Studio Code is itself open source through misleading marketing on their website and things like naming the github repository for "microsoft/vscode".

Thanks for the clarification!

Bruh, you can write your own extension, or use an extension created by another individual or company which is open source. They’re simply enforcing the policy that their extension can only be used with their VScode.

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