Comment by jdiez17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdiez17 | Hacker News Reader

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> VSCode is not open-source

Partly true, partly false. VS Code is FOSS (MIT license). The VS Code binary that Microsoft distributes is freeware (proprietary license).

> and neither is this extension

Correct.

> That's just proprietary, software plain and simple.

Indeed, the Pylance extension is proprietary software.

> In the way that third-party distributions of VSCode do not come with the same rights to extend the software or use it in combination with compatible extensions

False. Third party distributions of VSCode can absolutely use compatible extensions. The license of certain proprietary extensions does not allow you to use them with third party distributions of VSCode.

> It's not that your modified copies must give your users the same rights to inspect and modify the code as you had (that's copyleft) but that you are unable to give them such rights. MS does this not entirely through the licensing of VSCode but also through the licensing of certain extensions

The VSCode license prevents you from reverse engineering, modifying it, and you agree to send some telemetry to Microsoft. You're correct that the MS distribution is not FOSS. It's the same with Chrome (the code base) and Chrome (the browser binaries that Google distributes).

> Neither VSCode nor this extension is open-source.

Again, to be clear: VSCode (the binary) is not OSS, but the source code used to build VSCode (the binary) *is* OSS. Pylance (the extension) is straight up proprietary software.

> Note that these are not definitions in the ordinary lexographical sense. They are terms that were created with explicit social and technical purposes in mind, by and for organized movements. This isn't an argument from the dictionary but a reminder of the purposes of these concepts.

The MIT license represents a different view on the social and technical goals of open source software. It's much simpler than the GPLs and only has one obligation for the user/redistributors: display a copyright notice. It's not as copyleft as the GPLs.

Building the open source repo gets you something which isn't VSCode. It doesn't install a lot of VSCode extensions, therefore you shouldn't call it VSCode and shouldn't say VSCode is FOSS.

This is very well put. If the open source repo was named "VSCodium" it would communicate better what is going on. (Chrome / Chromium.)

Edit: to be clear, I think Microsoft should offer VSCodium themselves and state clearly that they take that, bundle it with other stuff, and are calling that blob VSCode.

> I think Microsoft should offer VSCodium themselves

The instant they do that I'm moving to Theia or something else (zed?). MS is not to be trusted, as outlined by this article.

Yes. I was a bit sloppy in using 'VSCode' to refer only to the thing distributed at code.visualstudio.com but also treating derivative works of what Microsoft calls 'Code - OSS' in their GitHub repo as defective (more limited) derivatives of 'VSCode'.

> The MIT license represents a different view on the social and technical goals of open source software. It's much simpler than the GPLs and only has one obligation for the user/redistributors: display a copyright notice. It's not as copyleft as the GPLs.

The MIT license is a tool used for a range of purposes, not an expression of values. It doesn't 'represent a view' about how software should be developed or distributed in the same way that documents like, e.g., the FSF's account of the four fundamental software freedoms, the OSI's Open-Source Definition, or the Debian Free Software Guidelines do. It sits at a different layer. Moreover, all of those documents incontestably include MIT-licensed software among the licenses that embody their values-- none of those organizations or movements they participate in exclude permissively licensed software.

That some source code is distributed under the terms of the MIT license only tells us a little bit about the way and extent to which it is or isn't aligned with the values and touted benefits of either the free software movement or the open-source movement. There are individuals (and organizations, if you count the contributor bases of large, relatively organized software projects) who are interested in software freedom and/or open-source development but averse to copyleft, but permissive licenses don't themselves exclusively support only one set of values and goals or constitute a statement of allegiance to other doctrines (and neither do copyleft licenses).

And that's part of what makes statements of values and ideas that go beyond licenses per se, like the ones I cited but also books like Free Software, Free Society and The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and the many shorter online documents one can find at FSF.org, EFF.org, sfconservancy.org, or even the OSI's policy advocacy work valuable: they transmit the things that copyright licenses cannot. They are reminders that adopting software and software development practices means making choices about entering into concrete relations of power, dependency, collaboration, and competition. The F/OSS licenses are instruments in service of meaningful choices about those things. And that's exactly the way that my recourse to things like the Open-Source Definition and the FSF's article What is Free Software was not to make a merely verbal dispute, arguing about what words mean, but a move to ground this discussion in the range of first-order values for which F/OSS licenses are instruments. That's something equally relevant and equally worth doing whether the licenses in question are maximally permissive (like the technically-not-a-license of donating a codebase to the public domain), strong copyleft licenses like AGPLv3, or something else like LGPL or MPL.

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