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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

#71

Post by yebyen »

jakear wrote: post #39
yebyen wrote: 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.

Maybe you can show me the actual mistake, because no commit was apparently referenced in either the post I replied to or the parent post.

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

#72

Post by lucideer »

nsomaru wrote: post #46
lucideer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't suffice unfortunately. That setting has worked inconsistently, or not at all, and add far as I've seen in my own testing it never disables all telemetry. There have been issues open on GitHub about this for a long time, though it's a few months since I checked there for updates (I stopped bothering and just put it in my firewall rules; I still see blocked connections in thy log today). I'm a very happy v…

Can you share the firewall rules/domains to block to disable telemetry for VSCode?

There's a lot of traffic that comes from VSCode, so it's sometimes hard to tell which is which—e.g. the autoupdate checker, and the "Code Helper" queries to schemastore to get JSON validation configs for the JSON files in your project, and the NPM queries for package.json

I block most of it anyway, with a couple of individual exceptions, but other than those examples mentioned above, there's also:

- dc.services.visualstudio.com (40.114.241.141, 52.169.64.244)

- vortex.data.microsoft.com (40.77.226.250, 65.55.44.109, 51.141.13.164, 51.140.40.236)

- bingsettingssearch.trafficmanager.net (13.95.93.152)

I actually have no clue what the last one there is (Bing)—I must have known at some point, but have long forgotten.

Notable exceptions allowed: marketplace.visualstudio.com (13.107.6.175, 191.238.172.191, 13.85.19.92)

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

#73

Post by craftyguy »

floatingatoll wrote: post #67
TimTheTinker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never trust a binary more than you trust the person who built it and the channel you downloaded it through. A better method might be to fork VSCode’s repo and modify the build scripts and/or code to remove telemetry.

Gentoo’s biggest failure to me is in persuading people that building from source is somehow safer than binaries. Never trust a source code repository more than you trust the people who commit it and the channel you downloaded it through. Autoupdates from a source repository that you don’t review before accepting updates are no safer than autoupdates from a binary source.

> Gentoo’s biggest failure to me is in persuading people that building from source is somehow safer than binaries.

I don't think this is a big reason Gentoo users use Gentoo. At least not the knowledgeable ones.

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

#74

Post by pritambaral »

codedokode wrote: post #69
jolan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to send as little data as possible to Microsoft there are other settings to consider: "telemetry.enableCrashReporter": false, "code-runner.enableAppInsights": false, "update.channel": "none", "extensions.autoUpdate": false, "extensions.ignoreRecommendations": true, "workbench.settings.enableNaturalLanguageSearch": false

What stops Microsoft from adding new settings tomorrow?

Or from re-enabling disabled settings with an update, like they've done with Windows 10.

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

#75

Post by ectospheno »

ekianjo wrote: post #48
carlmr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it suffice to set the following in your User Settings? "telemetry.enableTelemetry": false Honestly I'm very happy to give telemetry data. Microsoft is doing so much to improve the experience, they can make it better with some data.

Telemetry should not be on by default without express user consent.

It is only without express user consent for those who enter into contracts without reading them. Assuming you aren't one of those people then you consented.

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

#76

Post by yebyen »

jakear wrote: post #64
dwild wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A legal response to my ethical one. When I already granted the legal aspect of the argument.

That's a technical response to your technical question. The license is there, in the master branch. I don't see any reverted commit, the code is simply licensed as MIT as far as we can tell.

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

#77

Post by filleduchaos »

josteink wrote: post #44
temp wrote: post #31

Doesn't have the latest build for macOS. :(

Disclaimer: general comment. Not affiliated with project, etc. I don’t know about you, but I don’t typically feel like shelling out $1000 to buy a machine specifically for an OS I don’t use, just to build a binary to non-paying users of free software. If Apple would provide easily installable ISOs for VBox/VMWare installations (or something equivalent), I might bother setting up a build for it. Right now it’s out of…

> but I don’t typically feel like shelling out $1000 to buy a machine specifically for an OS I don’t use

I keep seeing this argument and it honestly just sounds rather lazy when a few seconds of Googling will point you towards build services you can use without having to purchase a Macbook (for instance, TravisCI has an OS X build environment). Or if you're opposed to cloud-hosted build tools for some reason you could ask users/the user requesting a macOS binary would mind working with you to test your build script(s) for compatibility and mention that Mac users will have to build from source in your README. This whole "well I would if Macs weren't so expensive" sounds like "I just don't want to support macOS" because you have options if you actually were interested.

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

#78

Post by jakear »

yebyen wrote: post #76
jakear wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A legal response to my ethical one. When I already granted the legal aspect of the argument.

That's a technical response to your technical question. The license is there, in the master branch. I don't see any reverted commit, the code is simply licensed as MIT as far as we can tell.

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/commit/f1d0c1d88417f85ec...

This is the revert of the mistakenly committed code. In this repository's readme there is a link to a thread where (presumably the author, I didn't check) says that the public should be able to use the proprietary URLs because a commit was made that contained them (the parent of the above), and thus they are open source. While this may be technically true, and legally sound, I still claim it is ethically ill founded. You don't need to share my ethical framework.

I do not want, for instance, see the extension gallery become encrypted as a result of third party applications breaking the EULA. This is a very distinct possibility, and it could prevent people such as myself who normally compile vscode themselves, and download and install the VSIX packages manually, from doing so.

That being said, a team member has stated that injecting the URL into your own product.json is fine (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1557#issuecomment...). So I could be overreacting here.

But to me the question is purely a moral one, and a question of what kind of president this sets. I don't believe the community should be trying to find legal "gotchas" in order to get around reasonable limitations set in place by a team, else teams will begin to stop using as permissive licenses as they do.

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

#79

Post by jakear »

yebyen wrote: post #71
jakear wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you can show me the actual mistake, because no commit was apparently referenced in either the post I replied to or the parent post.

The parent of this [1] commit was referenced in a thread linked in this repo's readme. I said this in a different thread, but I'll repeat here: I don't believe the community should be trying to find legal "gotchas" such as this one in order to get around reasonable limitations set in place by a team, else teams will begin to stop using as permissive licenses as they do. This is a matter of ethics for me, as the legal nature of committing to an MIT licensed project is not up for debate. You of course don't need to share the same ethical framework as me.

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/commit/f1d0c1d88417f85ec...

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

#80

Post by GordonS »

pritambaral wrote: post #74
codedokode wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops Microsoft from adding new settings tomorrow?

Or from re-enabling disabled settings with an update, like they've done with Windows 10.

They are different products, different teams, different target markets - I've been using VSCode since it was first released, and they haven't done any anything scummy in that time, or given me any reason to distrust them or their motives. All they've done is provide a great product that I love.

The VSCode team is responsive on GitHub, and are driving development based on the feedback and telemetry they receive. I really am a staunch privacy advocate, but I'm not dogmatic about it - telemetry has it's place.

It can also easily be disabled if you don't want to send it.

Honestly, I don't see the point of this 'fork'.

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