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by veidr 418 days ago
It’s plenty open source — that is why all these forks exist!

VS Code itself does not work without various propriety stuff, but that is a different thing. A large number of open-source projects work that way. If you don’t like the proprietary stuff, the recourse is to fork it, modify it, and implement the remaining stuff yourself.
1 comments
ezst 417 days ago
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ ; I'll just leave this here.
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veidr 417 days ago
Yeah, I know all about that stuff. But nevertheless, you _can_ fork it.

Is it the most awesome, selfless, altruistic version of open source? Clearly not.

But is it better than being proprietary closed-source software? Well, that's a value judgement, so we can each decide that for ourselves. Personally, I think so, but maybe it depends. Regardless, though, it's open source, and if it weren't the software landscape would look very different.

Cursor, Windsurf, etc. would presumably not be as far along as they are, because they'd have to invest in basic editor functionality. Among many other projects, both open-source and otherwise.

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ezst 416 days ago
> Regardless, though, it's open source

Some major bits and pieces of the base editor are, but little of what makes vscode into a usable productive tool (namely, the refined extensions and LSP implementations around it, i.e. what users come to expect when they install it in the first place) is open-source. vscode put a lot of marketing effort into being perceived as open-source so to buy sympathy from eventual users.

Let's stop at "vscode is open-source in a very narrow and limited capacity, and thoroughly deceptive in its messaging".

I would honestly love to see the result of a survey asking vscode users whether they think they are using an open-source product, and how much of that is actually verified based on the extensions being used.

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veidr 415 days ago
> Let's stop at "vscode is open-source in a very narrow and limited capacity, and thoroughly deceptive in its messaging".

OK, yes, I agree; we should stop, as the disagrement seems to boil down to semantics.

I think "open source" is basically binary (modulo the usual free-as-in-beer or free-as-in-beer-but-also-you-can't-do-stuff-I-don't-like ambiguity).

But some nuance does come into play around "VS Code" — what is it? It feels the same as Chrome to me, but it's harder to see where the VS Code equivalent of Chromium is. (Not super hard, mind you, but Chrome/Chromium make it explicit, whereas VS Code does not.)

Anyway, I agree that VS Code is (while still, IMO, "open-source") is not "open-source to the point of maximal awesomeness".

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