[fadzlan]

The extension by design is made to be optional to use and are not integral (I would argue) to the vanilla experience of VS Code.

That also means that if other people wants to create their own proprietary extensions they can do so. The basic experience of the plain VS Code does not change.

Now one can say indeed that the Remote and also LiveShare is the best extension there of, and since the extension author decides not to share the code, then it stays proprietary. It's just that this time the author is Microsoft itself.

But because the extension itself is not integral to the VS Code itself and merely an extension, there is no stopping anyone to create open source version of the same experience.

However, where I have issues with is that, if you were to base you own editor with VS Codium (the open source, without the telemetry), you still can't use the service that is the extension marketplace for VS Code. Yes, even if it still works, and even if the extension itself is open source. Hence, just because VS Code has a lot of extensions that is open source, does not mean it is readily reusable, because the extension service is off limits.

Of course, one can also publish the same extension in another public directory if they want, but currently there is no such directory exist. And it has to be republished to the new public extension directory.

So yes, VS Code is open source, but the access to the extensions is not currently.

[swsieber]

There is an alternative public directory: https://open-vsx.org/

It's used by vs codium and theia.

It's not just those two plugins, it's also the ms-code.cpptools which has proprietary parts. And that's sad because other plugins are built on it like platformio. Which prevents platformio from being added to ovsx because the cpp tools can't be added to ovsx.

Which stinks for me because the cpp proprietary parts are windows only, and all I want to use platformio from is theia running on Linux, but I can't.

VS Codium: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

Theia IDE: https://theia-ide.org/

More details about PlatformIO not being to be added to OVSX: https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions/issues/86

More cpp tools licensing details: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/5784

Edit: you can run theia from one computer and use it via the browser on another. That's why I was so excited for it.

Edit 2: VS Codium, not open codium

[pythonaut_16]

The other side is that keeping some extensions closed-source probably allows the VS Code team to access more of Microsoft's work. I would guess that the proprietary parts of ms-code.cpptools are using code from Visual Studio and other closed-source Microsoft tooling.

[swsieber]

Oh, definitely. I understand it. It's just sad for me, personally, since I don't use those parts but it blocks other things (cpp dependent) plugins.

[wlesieutre]

code-server has most extensions available. They do it by scraping GitHub for extensions and building them.

https://github.com/cdr/code-server/blob/3da6c561b83d2a4c57f3...

The Microsoft extensions are notably missing, but they have a lot of other ones. There's an issue template for requesting another one if you find something missing.

Not sure if their second extension store is available for use by software other than code-server, but it's not an impossible problem.

[nhooyr]

code-server also lets you customize the marketplace URL at runtime.

https://github.com/cdr/code-server/blob/master/doc/FAQ.md#ho...

  SERVICE_URL=https://open-vsx.org/vscode/gallery
  ITEM_URL=https://open-vsx.org/vscode/item

So you can use open-vsx, ours or Microsoft's (with the caveat that you would violate their license).

See this thread: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/31168#issue-24453...

[jamesgeck0]

There's been recent discussion about TypeFox and Coder combining efforts on Open VSX after the transfer to Eclipse Foundation is complete.

https://github.com/cdr/code-server/issues/1473

[nhooyr]

It is indeed, anyone should feel free to use it.

I work at @cdr

[patatapatato]

VSCode is not open source, VSCodium is.

VSCode includes extra twitter/microsoft spyware (or "telemetry" for those who prefer that euphemism).

The "VSCode" binary you download includes unknown proprietary extras.

Fun fact : VSCode official home page used to have the motto "Open Source", now it is "Built on Open Source" (check on the wayback machine if you don't believe me)

I guess the MS legal team was afraid of keeping lying about the openness of VScode yet they knew Open Source is a good buzzword to attract devs so they played with words.

This is the typical big corporate approach :

Step 1) Say you develop an Open Platform so that you get many users and free contributions.

Step 2) Once you own the market and people are too addicted to switch, bit by bit make it proprietary, add more spyware.

This is the story of Android , VSCode, ONNXRuntime, and many others.

[belltaco]

Telemetry isn't a euphemism for spyware.

[giancarlostoro]

I think enough of VS Code is open sourced to where if it truly were necessary to do a more serious fork with a community market place and all that jazz it would probably build up a userbase. Developers dont like certain amounts of shennanigans from companies. If Microsoft doesnt want to risk a mass exodus they will make sure not to do anything extra stupid with VS Code. Especially considering for some its the one Microsoft product sucking them in.

Update:

On the other hand with Neovim being able to run headless you may just need that and VS Code stripped and use Neovim for the underlying editing and plugins if you really wanted to have a more open VS Code ecosystem. Kind of a hack, but it would work.

[smaudet]

Perhaps it is worthwhile to mint some new phrasing.

VS Code is a closed, proprietary platform. Something like emacs, vim is 100% open source, open platform.

Open platforms tend to be a lot easier to write code for, use, extend, etc. You can't build an editing empire on VS Code - at the end of the day no matter how brilliant you are, they own the distribution 100%, so it might as well be closed source - much the same as how there are hundreds of open source clients for twitter, 'open access' APIs, but Twitter is very much, very, very proprietary.

The promise of OSS is and was that you can always freely modify, build, hack on whatever, and that you don't have to be a talented reverse engineer to do it or write large swathes of 'special sauce' magic drivers yourself. Its almost the same gambit as Apple's - Darwin is indeed Open Source but nobody would say OSX is open source - quite the opposite.

Locked down proprietary walled-garden cant-take-your-code-wherever premium platform with a very much pay-to-play mindset. Which, I'm not surprised - its great that MS is doing open source, cool beans, but who really thought they'd become a charity or a truly concerned 'digital citizen'. Although those types of (succesful) companies are becoming rarer and rarer, as is wont to do with capitalism.

Don't blame the license, blame the motivations?