Damn, if people really are this gullible I should become a con artist. "Well technically I never said that the gold plated gold watch I was selling was made of gold, sooooo I'm just gonna leave. And if you're mad at me, that's on you."
Honestly - not the best project to pick on. VS Code is actually one of the more open projects Microsoft has made.
A good chunk of the best functionality is behind extensions which are often proprietary, but that actually doesn't bother me that much. Especially because many of the proprietary extensions rely on functionality provided by 3rd party servers, where the owner (usually MS) is eating the cost. That seems fair to me.
Again - Microsoft customizes that in the same way the google customizes chromium, but having built both from source... I find it hard to argue it's anything other than open source tooling.
Again - the ecosystem is not (although it certainly can be, depending on the extensions used).
> I'd love to see someone downvoting me provide a compelling response to the full source available here under the MIT license
You are literally pointing to a github repo in order to respond to a complain about how MS makes github repos just to create the false appearence that their software is FLOSS.
For example, the C/C++ parser also appears to claim to be "MIT" licensed if you go to the repository:
However, it actually is not, by evidenced by the two line disclaimer at the beginning of that file. The entire thing is absolutely useless without the gigantic 100MB intellisense binary. Most definitely this does NOT rely on any functionality provided by "3rd party servers". It is entirely offline, 1st party code, that gets surreptitiously installed alongside the FLOSS "package". Likewise for C#, likewise for debugging, likewise for remote development, and a very long etc.
If this is not misleading, I don't know what is. The core editor being free is just a red herring here; most people think of VS code as an IDE, and are therefore disappointed by the "core editor" functionality offered by VSCodium. In fact, people will routinely ask me "why can't I use VS Code on RISC-V, if it's FLOSS?". These are knowledgeable people, and yet they are mislead by this.
I mean - I don't know what you really expect out of open source then.
The source is right fucking there. I have literally built the project on my machine using it.
It's also not at all comparable to the repo for WSL in the top post (which is literally just a couple of text files, a handful of scripts, and a binary release - which I'd certainly agree is not really open source).
I'm not really sure how you can possibly portray having the literal buildable source present as misleading. Is it misleading that I can purchase binary software designed to run on my open source linux distro?
Because that's just as much of an extension of my OS as something like VS Remote Development (or their c++ intellisense) is an extension for Code.
Further - you're talking about tooling here that MS has consistently kept closed source (historically they're very restrictive with their C++ and C# compilers). As an alternative - language support for something like Typescript absolutely is open.
Basically - what is it you want, exactly? Because again - this thing is really about as open source as it can get. Is Microsoft keeping some nice extensions closed? Sure - they're allowed to do that. That doesn't make this any less open source.
> It's also not at all comparable to the repo for WSL in the top post (which is literally just a couple of text files, a handful of scripts, and a binary release - which I'd certainly agree is not really open source).
"The source is right fucking there" too even in that case. Do you see that the point is how much of the product is actually open source versus how much is not? What I have said is that a lot of people overestimate how much of VS Code is open -- and this applies even to yourself: in your initial post you thought the only closed parts were "some which required 3rd party online services", but actually almost everything from the IDE is closed, even stuff like debugging that does not even remotely involve 3rd parties nor online services. You have been mislead by MS yourself, yet you still claim that what they're doing is not misleading.
> I'm not really sure how you can possibly portray having the literal buildable source present as misleading.
Yet you understand how the "WSL" example is misleading too. It's literally the same thing just moved even more to the extreme. They put some "source" which is literally a negligible portion of the binaries they ship. Sure it is buildable, otherwise it wouldn't even qualify as source.
> Is it misleading that I can purchase binary software designed to run on my open source linux distro?
This analogy is absolutely broken. First, the binary software would have to be 1st party. Second, the binary part should be practically larger than the otherwise open-source distro itself. Third, it would have to be required to use this binary software to do almost anything _of value_ with the distro itself. Fourth, the differences between the open source and closed source parts must be diffuse (e.g. shipped as part of the same binary package, automatically downloaded, at zero cost, etc.). And fifth, the distro must still advertise itself as a "open source" product. Then you would have the correct analogy.
What exactly would you say makes me gullible? I never said it was open or free, that was completely fabricated by yourself and others. The repo doesn't even say it's open.
