Whether or not you care about VS Code's telemetry is up to you. It's unlikely that Microsoft is literally tracking your every move, and there's lots of software out there these days that gathers usage data. Most notably, VS Code includes telemetry, which is tracking software. In practice, the differences between VS Code and Code - OSS are minimal. But when you clone and build the code yourself, none of these targets is configured, so you generate a 'clean' version, which is called Code - OSS (OSS stands for open source software). The official Microsoft-branded release is customized with Microsoft-specific functionality, including a trademark, an extensions gallery, a proprietary C# debugger, and telemetry.

VS Code is indeed built upon an open source codebase. The difference is in the build process.Ĭhris Dias, a Microsoft developer on the VS Code project, makes a comparison between VS Code and, for instance, the Chrome browser and its open source 'upstream' project, Chromium. Yet when you download the VS Code application from Microsoft, you'll find that your download is licensed under the Microsoft Software License. VS Code's source code is available on GitHub.

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