[premun]

I agree but also - a controversial opinion - I am pretty sure Microsoft collects the kind of telemetry to learn about user behavior and improve the IDE, and not to collect private information for some kind of other gain. I am sure that whoever develops Codium will eventually get into a dead-end at some point because they won't have any telemetry connected to the product usage. Other piece is that Codium might inherently actually thrive because of some product decisions based on the telemetry Microsoft has so so it's not a fair fight.

Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft employee and this is my opinion only but I say this because I know what it's like to work on apps used by tens of millions of people and I can tell you that you're dead in the water when you have no idea how people use your product. And no, at this scale, controlled user testing is not sufficient. I've worked on countless Microsoft products over the years from Office through Skype to Teams. I've also been personally adding some telemetry into these but ALWAYS to be data driven when making product decisions such as "which button should we display here", "did we improve latency/stability/discoverability/.." and "which new feature will be actually useful".

Now.. I don't know VS Code 100% but I did see some internal talks, have access to some telemetry (didn't browse it much) and I can say that the team is full of good intentions. They just deal with difficult UX problems. I've also worked at Google and I think it's much different when your product/business is using/selling data about customers as compared to creating tools for developers. You are after a very different type of data in essence and I think the actual privacy is not contended here.

I am sure people will spin this the usual way "big company big bad" and "you never know what they will try to collect next" but in that case, I can only suggest you get a job in one of these companies and see how you will develop anything without real data to back your decisions and assumptions about the real world.

[Beltalowda]

> I am sure that whoever develops Codium will eventually get into a dead-end at some point because they won't have any telemetry connected to the product usage.

Note that VSCodium is not a fork; it's just a build of the open-source VSCode parts with telemetry patched out and a few other minor changes.

[shaan7]

I am really curious but do not have the time to check this myself: is the vscode telemetry part of the open core bit? The reason I ask this is because I agree with your points and I usually allow telemetry for FOSS programs (for example [1]).

If the telemetry code is open and people can verify that there isn't any identifiable data that is being collected, I don't see any issue with leaving it on in vscode too.

[1] https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/what-we-can-learn-fro...

[elashri]

Some of the telemetry is not added until when later when VSCode get bundled with it and some proprietary stuff and signed for distribution. This is where VSCodium do the stuff. they take the same source code, apply some patches and build the program with open-vsx open source marketplace and they call it a day.

All of this actually happens and piped using github action found on the repository. You can have a look there.

[btdmaster]

Is the telemetry data in KDE publicly available?

[digisign]

This doesn't jibe with history. Or the present for that matter, see sibiling to your comment by btdmaster. Uses of data always expand, never contract.

It doesn't matter that most or even 99% of the data is harmless, or that the data is useful, these companies are simply not trustworthy. The fact that no one asks permission up front (opt-in) tells you all you need to know.

[Xunjin]

Shameless plug: I would love your "good words/faith" about me so I could get hired by Microsoft :P