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VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

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Re: VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

#51
post #14

Finally. It obviously is something that flies over the heads of most people here at least by reading the comments. This is great.

I don’t personally see the need, but the fact that someone can do this should at least once and for all settle how “real” the open-sourceyness of VSCode is.

Some of us want to write code without shipping a bunch of usage data / telemetry / whatever back up to the Mothership.

It's the principle of the thing; and anything that shaves off a few clock cycles is fine by me.

Re: VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

#52
post #14

Finally. It obviously is something that flies over the heads of most people here at least by reading the comments. This is great.

I don’t personally see the need, but the fact that someone can do this should at least once and for all settle how “real” the open-sourceyness of VSCode is.

https://code.headmelted.com/ Has already done this but without extension support. Support for extensions requires adding content to the product.json beyond what the MIT licenses version contains. This content is traditionally proprietary, but the author of this repo managed to find an instance where it was mistakenly committed and is using that to justify it being MIT licensed now. Whether you agree with this is up to you I guess. I personally would object to using someone’s mistake to subvert their teams wishes.

And for either of these projects, I wouldn’t use their products without first verifying they are what they say they are. I’d do this by downloading the vscode repo and building directly from source then comparing. But at that point I have two of the same thing (hopefully), so not sure why this is needed in the first place.

Re: VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

#53
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t personally see the need, but the fact that someone can do this should at least once and for all settle how “real” the open-sourceyness of VSCode is.

Some of us want to write code without shipping a bunch of usage data / telemetry / whatever back up to the Mothership. It's the principle of the thing; and anything that shaves off a few clock cycles is fine by me.

VS Code already provides mechanisms to disable all background network activity.

Re: VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

#54
post #23
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't it agains't GDPR having it be like that?

wouldn't downloading and agreeing to the eula suffice for purposes of this?

No. GDPR requires that users must be able to use the service after opting out of data collection (except if the data collection is required for rendering the service to the user). A EULA, in contrast, must be accepted, otherwise the service may not be used.

Re: VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

#55
post #2

I don't see the beneficial element to this project. Visual Studio Code is opensource, free of charge and used by millions at this point, why would anyone want another license just because of the license alone?

If there's people that use Chromium binary builds, there's people that will use this.

Makes sense for inclusion in package repositories.

Re: VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

#56
post #39
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why assume the commit was made in error? It looks like there has been some discussion and it was done completely on purpose. You cannot compile the binary from arbitrary commits by yourself and release copies of the compiled work as "Microsoft's VS Code" – that's understandable, unless you work for the VS Code team, why should you be able to do that? There are trademarks. But the source code is MIT licensed and I thi…

Mate that discussion was a year prior to the commit in reference. How can you think it backs up your point? And I assume the commit was made in error because it was immediately reverted and is no longer present in the source. And I do not question the legality, my only assertstion was of the ethicality of taking someone’s mistake and using it to subvert their wishes.

What's this file then? https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

Re: VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

#57
post #2

I don't see the beneficial element to this project. Visual Studio Code is opensource, free of charge and used by millions at this point, why would anyone want another license just because of the license alone?

F the EULA license. That's what VS Code is licensed under when you download from their site, _not_ the MIT license. That's the heart of why this is excellent.

Re: VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

#58
post #17

Related: https://code.headmelted.com/

Strange way of downloading and executing the installer. Most usually you see either

1. Pipe it to an instance of sh or bash, or

2. Download, mark executable, run.

Instead, what they do is they run wget in a subshell and redirect the output of the subshell as input to the source builtin command.

    . 
Don't really see why though.

Speaking of which, the following would have been better:

    curl -sSf https://code.headmelted.com/installers/yum.sh | bash
With these parameters, curl should wait for the whole script to be successfully downloaded, and if it isn't it won't write any of it to stdout. Especially important because the authors of the above mentioned script have NOT wrapped the whole script in a function which is then called at the end of the script.

If the download fails midway and you are using wget -O - or curl without -f then you execute an incomplete script.

Also, executing the script by using the source builtin is annoying because if you answer "no" to the first question asked by this script then it closes your terminal window :<

Re: VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

#59
post #53
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us want to write code without shipping a bunch of usage data / telemetry / whatever back up to the Mothership. It's the principle of the thing; and anything that shaves off a few clock cycles is fine by me.

VS Code already provides mechanisms to disable all background network activity.

Defaults matter. They matter even more given Microsoft's demonstrated history of quietly adding new telemetry and metrics which are enabled.

I have no skin in this particular game, but I'm glad to see the work being done.

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