..and is not even open source (EDIT: I'm wrong, see below). Zed's remote server on the other hand seems to be OSS. One could probably install it themselves without relying on the automatic download.
The extension that invokes it isn’t, but there are a few implementations of it that are, and I think vscodium bundles one with their build. It’s just some shell scripts that download the reh build and run it with the correct args.
Hmm, are the docs outdated then or are they talking about something else?
> The Visual Studio Code Remote Development extensions and their related components use an open planning, issue, and feature request process, but are not currently open source.
That’s the extension which launches the server. The server itself, which is what runs on the remote machine, is part of the vscode repo itself. You can see this open source extension for an example of what the extension does as well as an explanation of what it does https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss
Mainly just sets up the UI/connect commands in vscode UI and launched REH (the vscode server) on the remote machine. The actual server is just a different binary you build from the same repo. Non-Microsoft OSS builds of vscode work with SSH fine.