No comment on the authors other claims, but VSCode is not open source. "Code - OSS" is the open base upon which VSCode is built. VS Code's branding, telemetry and more are closed-source. See https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-1... for a full explanation.
So we talk the Installer, the brand/icon (which is good that it is strictly owned by one entity) and literally settings. These do not make the product less open source (I do not dare to use the term free). Linux is free software, however RedHat is not. You can do everything with the OSS version you can with the VS Code.
However, there are extensions delivered in the Brand VS Code (Remote Server SSH/Docker/WSL) which are closed source (which compete against Eclipse Che). And that makes since a bit muddy.
The closed-source nature of VSCode is a little more practically important than you make it out to be. It prevents Linux distros from including VSCode in their package managers (except non-free categories, usually disabled by default). And makes it impossible to patch VSCode, only "Code - OSS". Also, for normal users, the brand/icon is everything. If they go to their computer and "the chrome icon is blue", they will want the old icon back, if only because it's the one they know and trust.
You are distorting facts by calling VSCode open source. This [1] is the license for VSCode. It lets you "use any number of copies of the software to develop and test your applications, including deployment within your internal corporate network". The license implicitly (by omission) does not let you distribute binaries to your friends and colleges outside of your "corporate network". This is the defining characteristic of freeware. I am not a lawyer, that was not legal advice.
Your argument is akin to calling google chrome open-source. Yes, it is based on the open source chromium, but Chrome is decidedly not open-source.
On a more practical note, the fact that Microsoft does not distribute an open source build of VSCode is pretty annoying.
Agree to the annoying practical situations for the distributions. Unfortunately, a structural Linux problem. Is not that the old Firefox problem. They need to protect brand and reputation and cannot trust downstream packages.
Disagree with chrome comparison. Chrome adds tons of feature packages which are blobs or heavily proprietary stuff. VS Code does nothing of that. They add config settings and icons.
In regards of the open source built: Microsoft does that with .NET and it seems a pain. I mean, what is an open source build? A package different for 20 distributions with each 5 versions. Or a build script (which I hope they have :))
I'm not familiar with the history or the closed-source feature set of chrome. This [1] search result shows rather minor features compared to a browser - codecs, flash player, auto-update (I suppose this is a big deal on non-linux). VSCode, on the other hand has a proprietary Visual Studio Marketplace extension, (extra?) telemetry and an updater. [2] (I found a better link)
I actually only want an open source build for macOS and Windows - on Linux I almost exclusively use what is in the package manager. I just wish "Code - OSS" had a more recognizable name (and icon), like "VS Code OSS edition" (with a different color of the same logo) Code OSS is just impossible to search.
For adopters, i.e. organizations that want to invent something new on top of existing open-source code, there is a huge difference between the VS Code-kind of open-source where the project is still fully controlled by a single vendor and vendor neutral open-source. E.g. Kubernetes wouldn't be where it is if Google hadn't put it into a vendor neutral open-source foundation.
You can tell from the many adopters of Theia, that there is demand for this. You don't see such downstream products based on VS Code, because of the lack of vendor-neutrality and because it was not designed to be customizable (beyond extensions). Finally, the fact that you can develop your IDE once and run it in browsers and as desktop app is important, too. VS Code doesn't do that directly as VSO is private code.
I agree to that. That is a different intent than what vs code project has. And that is the fair right of a project/community.
PS: I think it is a pity that they prevent this. The branding and leadership alone will make VS Code the dominant player completely independent of what derived product ever be. The lack of open sourced vscode-server makes me really unhappy.
However, there are extensions delivered in the Brand VS Code (Remote Server SSH/Docker/WSL) which are closed source (which compete against Eclipse Che). And that makes since a bit muddy.