filiptronicek

> Expect an announcement here with more details soon https://github.com/microsoft/vsmarketplace/

Hi Isidor, excited for this! At Open VSX, we'd love to take a look and potentially flag the extension as malicious on our side as well. Are you aware of the version range that the malicious code was included in? I'm asking because https://open-vsx.org does not have any version published since the extension went closed-source.

For sure legal. Technically, it's extremely simple to change the Marketplace in VS Codium, but it is against the ToS of Microsoft's Marketplace to change it to theirs (see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/31168#issuecommen... for more details). As the linked comment also states, this is a big part of the reason why Open VSX was created and is widely used by VS Code forks.

Hi, Filip from Gitpod here!

It is a bit puzzling to me that this would be an issue, since extensions generally do not call any VS Code binaries, they should ideally access everything through the VS Code Extension API (https://code.visualstudio.com/api) and never call any VS Code-related binaries, since VS Code can run on a portable mode as well. If issues like this arise, it is most likely a fault of the extension itself, so reporting should be done on a repository or an issue tracker of that extension. I have never seen an extension call the `code` binary, so I would guess it could realistically only be helpful for some kind of a workaround for an API limitation.

If you have any of these extensions that break on VS Codium, could you please share them with me? I would love to dig for more and help towards fixing said extensions there.

Hi there, Filip from Gitpod here.

The discrepancies you mentioned come down to the extension Marketplace used - in VS Code, it is the Microsoft VS Code Marketplace, but in VS Codium it is by default https://open-vsx.org/ (basically a FOSS alternative to the Microsoft one).

The names don’t match up, because on Microsoft’s Marketplace the author handle (display name) is used, but Open VSX returns the username as the author name. The username of the author 周鹏 is bung87 on both the Microsoft Marketplace and OpenVSX. I think this is a good thing to reconsider though and thanks a lot for sharing!

> with only 3.9K downloads The difference in the download numbers is as simple as the Microsoft Marketplace having their own install counter; Open VSX has less users and therefore less downloads for the extension. It is true that Open VSX’s approach can be potentially dangerous, since an extension A on the VS Code Marketplace does not have to be the same extension A , it is built on the belief that people will be taking only their namespaces. The verification check mark can help on Open VSX extension pages with this, but it is not available on the VS Code side (yet anyway :)). The Rails extension you mentioned has the checkmark, so it means that it is published by someone who is a part of the project. You can take a look at how it looks like on the extension page: https://open-vsx.org/extension/bung87/rails.