Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate this effort and am not suggesting it's not necessary. Just curious: are there any known ill-desired effects of the MS binaries? My understanding is that it's just branding and telemetry that can be turned off.

View on HN

The MS binaries are licensed in such a way that you're not allowed to redistribute them, if I'm interpreting https://code.visualstudio.com/license correctly. There are some other legal restrictions. So those binaries are technically not FOSS, which means a lot of people won't use them out of principle, and it may even be a bad idea to mirror them.

They can't be distributed in distro package managers which usually require everything to be foss.

Depends on the distro. For the main Debian repos, it's true. Others like Arch are more lenient, e.g. Arch packages the Steam client.

Are you sure arch distributes them? Like oracle jre, proprietary packages are downloaded during installation, i think debian non-free works similarly.

It's worth noting that VS Code is only available in the AUR:

[visual-studio-code-bin](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/visual-studio-code-bin/): Original binary from Microsoft

[code](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/code/): Build from latest release source code

[code-git](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/code-git/): Build from latest Git commit

The versions that build from source (`code` and `code-git`, AFAIK have telemetry disabled).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com