This is really not a big deal to the point "you should worry." The binaries Microsoft distributes are under a different license than the source (which is MIT).
The binaries contain telemetry, and it's definitely a bit suspicious-looking they don't want that disassembled but I'd guess that's a standard boilerplate license clause rather than deliberate. Questionable legal protection isn't going to do anything to stop someone from looking, so unless they've also put in effort to protect the telemetry mechanism and/or its payload through some technical means - which the article doesn't claim - it's hard to see a nefarious intent here.
On the plus side, I did learn about VSCodium [1] which I wasn't aware of before.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 17.1 ms ] threadThe binaries contain telemetry, and it's definitely a bit suspicious-looking they don't want that disassembled but I'd guess that's a standard boilerplate license clause rather than deliberate. Questionable legal protection isn't going to do anything to stop someone from looking, so unless they've also put in effort to protect the telemetry mechanism and/or its payload through some technical means - which the article doesn't claim - it's hard to see a nefarious intent here.
On the plus side, I did learn about VSCodium [1] which I wasn't aware of before.
[1] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
Thanks for pointing it out. TIL.