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Discussion on: Issues with VSCODE License — You should worry

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mcnerdius profile image
McNerdius

Normally i don't weigh in on issues such as this as i am a huge fan of VSCode and thus my opinion is biased. Here, though, misinformation is being spread in the comments regarding telemetry and the perspective of what is being "added" or "removed" is skewed.

The telemetry code and information isn't secret, hidden, closed-source, proprietary... You can look at the telemetry code in the repo, and you can view the telemetry information being sent by setting Log Level to Trace (F1->Developer->Set Log Level...) then navigating to Log (Telemetry) in the Output panel's dropdown.

While VSCodium does remove this code, it also isn't hidden from the public or "added in" to the official MS build. What is excluded from the MIT-licensed repo and added in to the MS-Licensed build are urls and keys used by the telemetry code. Excluding private keys and such from a git repo is standard practice, no ? To reiterate: they are not adding telemetry code to the MS build, they are excluding telemetry keys required for this functionality from the repo. (Of course, those biased against MS will point out that there is likely code that implements telemetry within the marketplace/debugging/etc code that is bundled with the official build - but this is incidental.)

There are other things like copyrighted icons/logos, marketplace/debugging/update code included as well, but that's not conspiracy-worthy is it ?

github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/D...

Now, for some opinion...

I look at telemetry of this sort as similar to voting. There are some features i use that i don't want to go away. If i (and others) let them know i'm using it, it's less likely to go away. If something is going wrong, i want them to know, so it can be fixed. You can skip voting or telemetry if you so choose, but you're not helping yourself or anyone else by doing so. And if you do share, you are likely to help yourself and others. A key difference being - MS isn't collecting any personal information and worst-case-scenario is the shared info is ignored.


If it can be shown that i'm mistaken about any of this, do let me know - i don't want to be spreading misinformation myself.