tl;dr is that the desktop app (including remote SSH sessions) is free to use with a permissive license (no account needed, no subscription, commercial use is OK, etc), but using Positron in a server mode does require a paid subscription.
Why did you relicense it under Elastic License 2.0 from VSCode’s MIT?
A better alternative would be proprietary extensions under a different license like Microsoft does.
We talk a bit about why we chose the Elastic license here: https://positron.posit.co/licensing.html
We have thought pretty carefully about what kind of functionality works well in extensions (in fact, we build and maintain a number of extensions!) and came to the decision that the more integrated data science experience we wanted to make required forking.
Also, are you using Open VSX, and what’s your take on the recent malware extension story?
We do use OpenVSX, yes, like the other forks, and our company is a major sponsor of OpenVSX. Security around the extension ecosystem is a pretty messy, complicated issue both for the proprietary Microsoft marketplace and OpenVSX. For example, the recent Amazon Q story! I currently think about it as conceptually fairly similar to the risks of using packages from PyPI or npm.
There is no doubt that your company maintains a lot of high quality open source code.
But in this case Posit is re-licensing Open Source code, with a "source available" license.
Posit is free to help itself to VSCodium, but not the other way around.
I do hope Posit will one day reconsider this.
>tl;dr is that the desktop app (including remote SSH sessions) is free to use with a permissive license (no account needed, no subscription, commercial use is OK, etc), but using Positron in a server mode does require a paid subscription.
I feel the FAQ would've been better off with this as an answer to a separate question ("Is Positron really free?").
First, this information is hard to infer from the text you have there.
Second, I wouldn't wouldn't know to look for this information in a question about the server mode. I don't know what it is before I look deeply into your product!
Before that, I want to know what is actually free about this platform, and what isn't. Then I can learn what the server mode is.