> I wasn't aware that VS Code was "proprietary malware"?
I'm sorry to see you are discovering this. VS Code is under this proprietary license [1]. As for the malware part:
> Data Collection. The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft. Microsoft may use this information to provide services and improve our products and services. You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation located at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-di.... There may also be some features in the software that may enable you and Microsoft to collect data from users of your applications.
(emphasis mine).
Indeed you can rebuild your copy or get Codium without the telemetry under the MIT license, and the software is really good, but it is a crippled version and does not make VS Code free software.
(edit: it's not pure / pointless theory! I'm sure there is an agenda behind VS Code not being really free. I would not be surprised if more and more "convenient" or important features were released as proprietary, and they also control the extension center (the market place), which is one of the main reasons Theia [5] exists. Beware not to lock yourself down in this ecosystem too much.)
> Just because the OS itself isn't open source[a] doesn't mean that Microsoft doesn't open source a whole crap ton of stuff
Microsoft is huge. The ratio between their proprietary code and the code that they open source is probably tiny. More importantly, they only release developer-related things, never things that target end users, except their telemetry-riddled Calculator [3].
> It is open source.[2] (ahem source available (sorry, FSF))
Hum. The reference for Open Source is the Open Source Initiative, not the FSF [2]. The FSF defines Free Software. These are almost equivalent things but still have two separate definitions.
Microsoft is not an open source software company. They just happen to be a huge software company and every huge software company open source a lot of code when it is strategic. I'm not judging, it's a fact. I'm happy to use some of their quality open source software targeted to the developer community like TypeScript, but an Open Source company would release their important code and be based on a business model around this.
And, no, we can't even really call Windows a source-available software. They share its source code to big entities so they can audit it, probably under NDA, and not everybody can access it. Actually you can find leaked code, but it is just this: leaked code. Mapbox-gl-js is a source-available software which is not open source (anymore) [4].
> Indeed you can rebuild your copy or get Codium without the telemetry under the MIT license, and the software is really good, but it is a crippled version and does not make VS Code free software.
I'm sorry to see you are discovering this. VS Code is under this proprietary license [1]. As for the malware part:
> Data Collection. The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft. Microsoft may use this information to provide services and improve our products and services. You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation located at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-di.... There may also be some features in the software that may enable you and Microsoft to collect data from users of your applications.
(emphasis mine).
Indeed you can rebuild your copy or get Codium without the telemetry under the MIT license, and the software is really good, but it is a crippled version and does not make VS Code free software.
(edit: it's not pure / pointless theory! I'm sure there is an agenda behind VS Code not being really free. I would not be surprised if more and more "convenient" or important features were released as proprietary, and they also control the extension center (the market place), which is one of the main reasons Theia [5] exists. Beware not to lock yourself down in this ecosystem too much.)
> Just because the OS itself isn't open source[a] doesn't mean that Microsoft doesn't open source a whole crap ton of stuff
Microsoft is huge. The ratio between their proprietary code and the code that they open source is probably tiny. More importantly, they only release developer-related things, never things that target end users, except their telemetry-riddled Calculator [3].
> It is open source.[2] (ahem source available (sorry, FSF))
Hum. The reference for Open Source is the Open Source Initiative, not the FSF [2]. The FSF defines Free Software. These are almost equivalent things but still have two separate definitions.
Microsoft is not an open source software company. They just happen to be a huge software company and every huge software company open source a lot of code when it is strategic. I'm not judging, it's a fact. I'm happy to use some of their quality open source software targeted to the developer community like TypeScript, but an Open Source company would release their important code and be based on a business model around this.
And, no, we can't even really call Windows a source-available software. They share its source code to big entities so they can audit it, probably under NDA, and not everybody can access it. Actually you can find leaked code, but it is just this: leaked code. Mapbox-gl-js is a source-available software which is not open source (anymore) [4].
[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/License/ [2] https://opensource.org/osd [3] https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/ [4] https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js [5] https://theia-ide.org/