The latter: https://vscodium.com/

Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.

The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.

Neither. Taken from Codium Github :

This is not a fork. This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft’s vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.

The code of VSCode is open source but not the binaries. Codium tries to fix that.

• Code - OSS is what’s actually open source. It’s like Chromium.
• VS Code is not open source and built on Code - OSS. This is like Google Chrome.
• VS Codium is open source and built on Code - OSS. It’s like Degoogled Chromium.

Codium also used an open extension marketplace. Microsoft’s cannot be used except by Microsoft products.

VS Code is the epitome of fauxpen source.

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Its like a less capable Emacs wannabe that is designed to frustrate you when nothing works in examples using proprietary crap in VS Code, then leverage your familiarity to get you to give in to using VS Code and its MASSIVE stalkerware stream of constant information across your network with no rhyme or reason for that traffic to exist.

They host their own marketplace. It doesn’t have everything, but it’s trivial to install any extension from a .vsix file. Unless you use 50 and need to update them…

No. https://www.eclipse.org/community/eclipse_newsletter/2020/march/1.php

Only Visual Studio Products Can Access the Extension Marketplace

While all of the projects listed above support VS Code extensions, only Microsoft products can use and connect to Microsoft’s Extension Marketplace. The terms of use for the Marketplace prevent any non-Visual Studio products from accessing it.

Gitpod employs a workaround where users upload .vsix files to install extensions. This causes unnecessary overhead as users have to download the files from GitHub, then upload them to Gitpod. Downloading extensions from the Microsoft Marketplace for any use other than in Microsoft products is prohibited as well.

Most extensions are developed by communities and published under permissive open source licenses. The requirement to distribute and access these community-owned extensions in a system with such restrictive terms of service does not seem right.

Our goal is to resolve this issue by hosting an open source extension registry at the Eclipse Foundation, a vendor-neutral organization. We’re doing this through the Eclipse Open VSX Registry project.

Yes, through a config file change.

I think it has to install vscode extensions, which is sad.