
Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. Is the FSF Crazy? - RuiCarvalho
Are the guys at the FSF smoking weed?<p>Point 5 of the license for the Visual Studio Code says:<p>You may not<p><pre><code>    -work around any technical limitations in the software;
    -reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the software except, and solely to the extent: (i) permitted by applicable law, despite this limitation; or (ii) required to debug changes to any libraries licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License which are included with and linked to by the software;
    -remove, minimize, block or modify any notices of Microsoft or its suppliers in the software;
    -use the software in any way that is against the law; or
    -share, publish, or lend the software, or provide it as a hosted solution for others to use, or transfer the software or this agreement to any third party.
</code></pre>
How on earth does this comply with the 4 essential software freedoms?!
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detaro
The code is under MIT, that's mostly what matters (and you can do everything
with it the MIT license allows, including building and distributing your own
variants of it, and distributing it under other licenses, just as MS does)

From the top of the license page:

 _This license applies to the Visual Studio Code product. The source code is
available under the MIT license agreement. Additional license information can
be found in our FAQ._

[https://code.visualstudio.com/License/](https://code.visualstudio.com/License/)

The FAQ links to
[https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-1...](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-161792005),
which explains it in detail (TL;DR: the "product" download is the MIT code
built with some MS-centric customizations (Logos, telemetry, ...) applied
through configuration)

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Someone
That's for the binary you download from Microsoft. You can still download the
source and build a binary from it that you are allowed to reverse engineer,
change, share, etc. You probability cannot call it "Microsoft Visual Studio
Code", though.

If it is all Microsoft's code, they are free to do double-license their stuff.
I haven't checked, but the binary could also be slighlty different from what
you get when you download the source and build it. For example, it could use a
close-source component somewhere.

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Tomte
What has Visual Studio Code to do with the FSF? There is something missing in
your rant.

