Telemetry reporting is common with software products these days. This tracking basically collects usage data and sends it to Microsoft to ‘help improve their products and services’. However, the installation files that Microsoft has created contain proprietary telemetry/tracking. The source code of VS Code is open sourced under MIT license. The ready to use binaries Microsoft provides are not open source. You can easily install Visual Studio Code in Linux thanks to the ready to use binaries in the form of DEB, RPM and Snap packages.Īnd there is a problem which might not be an issue for a regular user but significant to an open source purist. Yes, it’s one of the many open source products from Microsoft.

Due to its features, it’s considered one of the best open source code editors. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is an excellent editor not only for web developers but also for other programmers. It’s identical to VS Code with the single biggest difference that unlike VS Code, VSCodium doesn’t track your usage data. VSCodium exists to make it easier to get the latest version of MIT-licensed VS Code.Brief: VSCodium is a clone of Microsoft’s popular Visual Studio Code editor. If you want to build from source yourself, head over to Microsoft’s vscode repo and follow their instructions. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. 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. The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license

When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license. When we build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. According to this comment from a Visual Studio Code maintainer:

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.

Vscode vs vs studio