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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

The thing that bugs me about VSCode is it's labeled as open source but a lot of pretty critical and interesting components are closed source so you have no idea what's going on under the hood. Normally that's not too big of a deal (I use plenty of closed source apps), but when it's Microsoft it's hard to trust what they are doing with that data. That and I feel that this promotes vendor lock-in at multiple levels.

Overall claiming you're open source when a decent chunk of your code base is closed source is kind of like those people who always bring up that they are a non-profit organization and are doing things for the greater good, meanwhile it's mainly used as a way to evade as much taxes as possible while they live very generously. I have nothing against that personally but it's the way it's presented. It just gives off a bad vibe.

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Are you aware of vscodium? https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium#why-does-this-exist

I have not personally audited it to see if it's better or worse than upstream vscode, but I believe the spirit of the project is closer to what you had in mind

What are some of all these pretty critical and interesting components you mention?

I guess they are referring to the Microsoft provided plugins which are proprietary and their license denies usage with any VS code fork. Personally I've never felt the need to use them, but admittedly, I barely use VS code at all.

If I've never heard of those plugins, they cannot be that critical or even interesting.

Live Share is probably _the most_ interesting feature of the entire editor, and is not open source or usable with VSCodium. See [1] for further links.

[1]: https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-ar...

You have VS Code [1], and then there is the visual studio family of products [2] and then live-share [3].

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/?wt.mc_id=DX_841432

[2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/

[3] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/

Not sure you fully understand what the product called VS Code is, let alone its most interesting feature

The biggest feature is probably remote. This is what allows you to have your code in a remote location (SSH, WSL and containers) and still get an integrated experience as if things were all running locally. If your app is Dockerized or you use Windows with WSL and you like intellisense, you're likely using this feature.

Some of the language servers for popular languages are closed source too, which is weird because I thought the idea of a language server was to work together so all editors could get excellent language specific features without having to reimplement the same logic in every editor.

That's not an exhaustive list, just what I know off the top of my head. I also vaguely recall reading something about a year ago about some core bits of the editor being written in C++ for performance reasons and those are closed source but I can't find a reference and don't know enough about the code base to track that down so I don't want to say that with any type of authority. Would be great if someone more knowledgeable in the area could track that down, or come up with a more exhaustive list of things that aren't open source.

What you don't seem to grasp is the difference between a project, and the eco-system that grows around it. SSH, WSL, Docker, third party language servers etc are not a part of VS Code.

> That's not an exhaustive list

What list? You haven't mentioned a single one of "all these pretty critical and interesting components" you talked about.

> What you don't seem to grasp is the difference between a project, and the eco-system that grows around it. SSH, WSL, Docker, third party language servers etc are not a part of VS Code.

In my mind, the remote capability is pretty critical. It's something a ton of people use and would consider it a core feature of VSCode. It being a 3rd party plugin is semantics. I know a number of people who use VSCode because of that feature alone. It's a defining feature of the editor's editing experience.

Also there's some language servers too. Yes technically a plugin, but super critical to anyone who wants to use a language server's features.

Like the Chrome and Chromium relationship a lot of distros package VS Code as just Code for a version built by your distro without the proprietary extras.

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