Visual Studio Code

Details

A large part of the project is provided under an MIT license, but that license is for the core “Code - OSS” offering. “Visual Studio Code” is a distribution of “Code - OSS” with customizations applied and that’s provided under “MICROSOFT SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS” which are non-FOSS terms since they don’t provide open rights of modification & distribution, while limiting categories of use.

The project does provide a page regarding the differences between the versions, with notable non-FOSS customizations/additions including: Extension recommendations, remote development, and Telemetry/Surveys/Crash Reporting.

The non-FOSS distribution is provided by default under the name “Visual Studio Code”. There’s a significant overlap between the FOSS and non-FOSS variations when it comes to references and marketing within the project, and it can get quite confusing from a reader point of view. For example:

• The project readme title uses both names: Visual Studio Code - Open Source (“Code - OSS”)
• The MIT repo has a description of just “Visual Studio Code”.
• The “Code - OSS” repo is named “vscode”.
• The “MICROSOFT SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS” page for the project starts with the text “This license applies to the Visual Studio Code product. Source Code for Visual Studio Code is available at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode under the MIT license agreement at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt.”

Overall, there is little observed consistent use of “Code - OSS” to differentiate between the FOSS and non-FOSS offerings, and the project does not seem to distribute FOSS-only builds of its software, although there are community projects such as VSCodium which look to address this needed.

“Code - OSS” comes with an “extension marketplace” feature, which allows installing extensions from a remote server. The remote server configured in Visual Studio Code has terms & conditions that prohibit distributions of “Code - OSS” other than Visual Studio Code from using it, meaning FOSS distributions need to use or build an alternative solution to provide such an “extension marketplace”. The Open VSX Registry by the Eclipse Foundation is an example of an alternate open source option.

For some Microsoft provided extensions, the licensing can be unclear. For example, both the pylance extension and the remote development extensions are provided as built extensions under non-FOSS terms in the marketplace, but their marketplace listings link to repositories licensed under CC-BY-4.0, but which do not contain most source code for the extensions.

The project is managed by Microsoft, who appear to have a revenue of about $245 billion (2024).