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Comment by kamikaz1k | Hacker News Reader

If you read the issue, the first few lines say:

> The main landing page https://code.visualstudio.com for Visual Studio Code currently does the following:

> it states the offered version is "Free. Open Source." which suggests free software to anyone who knows what the difference of "free" and "open-source" in the common word use is

> Below it immediately offers download buttons for something licensed under https://code.visualstudio.com/License/ which is absolutely not free software in any modern definition of the word.

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for me it sounds more like legal ass covering than close sourcing vscode, so nobody can sue them for collecting telemetry or autoupdating, etc

Well that and the PR nightmare of people submitting pull requests to remove said telemetry code and then dominating the front page of hackernews / technology reddit / slashdot / what have you when MS closes the pull request. It's honestly quite a slimy brilliant thing they've done here.

I think I might be missing the sliminess here. MS invested time and money to build software and is offering it for free. As part of that offering they are bundling up the software to the point that you can just download it and run it. In exchange for this they want to be able to collect usage statistics so they know how their software is being used. They are also giving you the option to download the software from source and build it yourself if you don't want them to see how you are using the software. This all seems pretty fair to me.

Agreed. It doesn't seem any different to what, for example, Red Hat do with RHEL (which I also don't see the problem with).

Microsoft has a much darker past to come back from with this, so the stakes and expectations are much higher and community willingness to forgive much lower

The telemetry code (spyware) that is clearly in the binaries but missing from the MIT-licensed source code (people have already determined that the binaries don't match a build of the source code).

The telemetry usage is directly in the MIT source: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/f05063d13da8c6112ed...

The telemetry extension is open source too: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-extension-telemetry

And you can unpack the source for the distributed electron bundle yourself: https://medium.com/how-to-electron/how-to-get-source-code-of...

Then there is literally no reason for the license discrepancy

There is certainly A reason for the license discrepancy. It just may or may not be a good one.

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