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Ask HN: Is VSCode Open Source? What's with the License?

2 points by rcconf ↗ HN
I've recently switched from Emacs to VSCode and I've recently been looking at VSCode Development Environments and their more recent VSCode Server offering / Remote Development Environments (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server)

I thought wow, how cool, I could run VSCode Server on one of my remote servers or use SSH with Remote Development (which sets up VSCode Server for you and tunnels it I believe.) and edit remotely.

What's super concerning is the license term for VSCode Server (https://code.visualstudio.com/license/server):

You cannot...

host, share, publish, rent or lease the software; or

But I'm pretty sure Remote Development extension installs and runs VSCode Server for you (which means hosting the software.), essentially setting you up to break the license and open your organization to legal trouble since you're now hosting VSCode Server...

Holly molly, there's currently 13,462,303 users using the Remote - SSH extension, all of them breaking the licensing terms of VSCode Server?

7 comments

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mindcrime
Not sure about the line of delineation between "VS Code" and "VS Code Server", but "VS Code" itself is MIT licensed. See:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

This repository ("Code - OSS") is where we (Microsoft) develop the Visual Studio Code product together with the community. Not only do we work on code and issues here, we also publish our roadmap, monthly iteration plans, and our endgame plans. This source code is available to everyone under the standard MIT license.

rcconf
This is true, but there is a huge drawback to using the OSS version instead of the version provided by Microsoft. If you build VSCode from scratch, it appears you cannot access the VSCode Marketplace which allows you to install extensions.

So it appears there are indeed two versions:

- VSCode (OSS) from GitHub (unable to access the Extension Marketplace.)

- VSCode from Microsoft (able to access the Extension Marketplace BUT you must agree to their terms here https://code.visualstudio.com/license.)

I did not know there were two versions. So I think the issue still remains for using Remote Development under the VSCode from Microsoft. You break their license by using it since I think VSCode Server runs when you use Remote - SSH.

Honestly, this seems like a fair compromise from Microsoft. VSCode and VSCode Server is fully open source but you must develop your own Extension Marketplace or install extensions on-behalf of your users... they need a business moat somewhere, others may disagree tho.

I guess for my own usage of Remote SSH, I should build everything from source (which seems a bit silly considering everyone else is using Remote SSH.) but seems silly to also open yourself to legal trouble.

mindcrime
I did not know there were two versions.

Neither did I, but then again, I rarely use VS Code. I installed it a while back for working on some Azure specific stuff we were doing, but I generally use either Eclipse or Emacs for almost everything. Never got real invested in the VS Code ecosystem.

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