VSCodium

[wraith808]

https://vscodium.com/

Has anyone taken a look at this?  I've been using VS Code a lot (it's taken over from Sublime Text) and saw mention of this.  From the site:

Why Does This Exist
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. According to this comment from a Visual Studio Code maintainer:

When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. 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 you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license

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.

If you want to build from source yourself, head over to Microsoft’s vscode repo and follow their instructions. VSCodium exists to make it easier to get the latest version of MIT-licensed VSCode.

Just wondered if anyone had seen/used it.

[Shades]

Looked at it once. If you disable telemetry in VS Code, it is pretty quiet (depending on whatever extensions you have installed) with regards to network traffic. Hence I do not really saw a need to continue with VSCodium.

But it might be a good thing that it is there, so it keeps VS Code (more) honest. VS Code is a Microsoft product after all and they are allowed to (and did so in the past) change licensing of their products. Perhaps I should take a look at VS Codium again myself, it has been over a year since I last checked. Things might already have changed.