Talk:Visual Studio Code

Release history (public preview releases)

Here are some links from which information can be found regarding the history of VSCode. Note that these are primary sources. Secondary sources are preferred if available.

• 0.3 JUN 2015
• 0.5 JUL 2015
• 0.7 AUG 2015
• 0.8 SEP 2015
• 0.9.OCT 2015

- Bevo (talk) 10:45, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

License

According to LICENSE. It is a "TIME-SENSITIVE SOFTWARE". "The software will stop running on 31/12/2016 (day/month/year). You will not receive any other notice. You may not be able to access data used with the software when it stops running." So the correct definition of this software is SHAREWARE and not FREEWARE.

From Wikipedia: "Shareware is a type of proprietary software which is provided (initially) free of charge to users, who are allowed and encouraged to make and share copies of the program, which helps to distribute it. There are many types of shareware, and while they may not require an initial up-front payment, all are intended to generate revenue in one way or another. Some limit use to personal non-commercial purposes only, with purchase of a license required for use in a business enterprise. The software itself may be limited in functionality or be TIME-LIMITED. " (Emphasis my own)

References

--Superdouble (talk) 00:18, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Hello, Superdouble

With all due respect, you are dead wrong here. There are three problems: First, shareware has many criteria besides time limitation, none of which are present here. In addition, the time limitation in shareware is completely different. Finally, many other forms of software license have time limitations, including freeware.

In this case, the time limitation is in the form of preset time, while in shareware, it is in the form of a preset length of a period. In other words, those who download a shareware have a set period from the date of their acquisition of license to test the program, in most cases 30 days. But in this case, the program expires at 12:00 AM 31 December 2016, even if the user download it on 11:59 PM 30 December 2016.

Overall, the license agreement reads like a freeware in preview stage. All Microsoft preview software, freeware or paid, expire on a set date.

Best regards,

Codename Lisa (talk) 11:03, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

P.S. You might be interested to know that 31 December 2016 only applies to version 0.92. Older versions had earlier expiry dates. See http://web.archive.org/web/20150505073845/https://code.visualstudio.com/License. —Codename Lisa (talk)

Lisa, what is the point of keeping this discussion? The license HAS CHANGED. Are you sure this adds something to the topic? --Superdouble (talk) 22:00, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I am aware.

And this discussion was done and over for 15 days. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Best regards,

Codename Lisa (talk) 08:43, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Please note that the current license terms, and in particular item 5, make it neither Open Source nor Free Software. This is quite different from the license in the GitHub repository. We should probably reflect this ambiguity in the article. --152.62.109.203 (talk) 12:42, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Believe me, this isn't the first time Microsoft has been careless with its license agreements. (Want another example? Microsoft Safety Scanner's license agreement reads: "You may install and use one copy of the software on your device to design, develop and test your programs." Go figure!) As long as the majority of sources, including Microsoft conferences, say that it is intended to be the free and open-source, we should take that and go with it. —Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 07:01, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Would you object to adding a footnote about this? When I first saw the license on the main website, I thought the Wikipedia article was out of date or something. 152.62.109.203 (talk) 07:27, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Oh, I wouldn't. Maybe we should include the Github license as the main licensing source. Perhaps you'll have to wriggle a little until you reach a compromise that satisfies everyone but I for one, have no objection. —Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 07:34, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Clearly the official build is proprietary, while it is also available separately as free software for self-assembly from GitHub. Nobody knows if the official build is 100% from the same free source, and the official packaged download is definitely not provided under free software terms. I changed the text and info box to reflect those details accurately. 132.230.194.39 (talk) 14:38, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

In general it would be nice if the main article could make this more clear. Right now I am confused... the main article states that it is BOTH open source AND proprietary. So what is it now? 2A02:8388:1602:A780:3AD5:47FF:FE18:CC7F (talk) 22:00, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

The main article states no such thing. —Codename Lisa (talk) 13:04, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

Currently, the infobox lists the license of the "Source Code" as MIT and the license of the "Binaries built by Microsoft" as Proprietary software. This is conceptually incorrect, as a software license in general, and the MIT license in particular, refers to a program as a whole.

From the text of the MIT License: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software [...] the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...]". Users of VSCode clearly do not have these rights.

The situation is that the Microsoft product "Visual Studio Code" is based on an MIT licensed program called "Visual Studio Code - Open Source ("Code - OSS")", which is available through github. It is a situation similar to Chrome, a proprietary program, based on Chromium, a BSD licensed product. This situation was clarified, including the analogy with Chrome and Chromium, by a Microsoft employee.

In Wikipedia, the infobox of Chrome lists it as "Proprietary freeware, based on open source components". I am changing the infobox of this page to something similar.

Forgot to sign: 123popos123 (talk) 01:07, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Regarding a diff made by User:Codename Lisa on 21/1/2016

There is currently a diff that is still in the final revision of the article that contains limited factual content and only has user experience gripes from the perspective of one person. It also contains weasal words ("sporadic" feature set? "limited" scope?) Making such statements requires a solid baseline to compare, but the table provided as a source simply states facts about its feature set as well it should.

The diff in question can be found here: https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Visual_Studio_Code&diff=700919912&oldid=697742710

I think that User:Codename Lisa has done well with some of her other contributions, but for this article's benefit, I feel this particular one should be reverted. --Jjgoop (talk) 22:26, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

Hello, Jjgoop

"Sporadic" and "limited" are well with the limits of our weasel words guideline because there is a whole table there explaining their extent. To quote:

The examples given above are not automatically weasel words, as they may also be used in the lead section of an article or in a topic sentence of a paragraph, where the article body or the rest of the paragraph supplies attribution. Likewise, views which are properly attributed to a reliable source may use similar expressions if they accurately represent the opinions of the source.

Best regards,

Codename Lisa (talk) 22:11, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

You are confusing "limited scope" with "specific scope".

BTW look at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sporadic please. The feature set can't be described as "sporadic" when you look at http://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/overview (unless u don't understand what the plus signs in the table mean). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.52.28.3 (talk) 15:57, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Hello. Do you know what I see when I look at that table? I see inconsistency. VS Code is built like a makeshift hen-house. A little feature is added here and there without a goal or coordinated effort to support a certain language. VS Code is an app that has no purpose, just some random good ideas. But I said none of that. Wikipedia is no place for personal opinion. Thus I only reported the inconsistency in feature sets. If you have a better word in mind that explains the inconsistency better, please let us know.

Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 15:09, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

The plus signs in the Microsoft's table have no meaning whatsoever: The table is cumulative anyway and is not understood in any other way. The condemning fact is that the same set of features listed for one language is not supported for another. For example, there is no snippet support for Python.

Best regards,

Codename Lisa (talk) 11:25, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

I vote for reproducing the "+" signs as they are in the original table at http://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/overview#_what-languages-are-supported 188.26.112.186 (talk) 17:45, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

My dear friend, the law doesn't work with voting: Using plus sign brings in copyright violation concerns unnecessarily. (See WP:COPYPASTE.) The plus signs add no new meaning (see WP:REDEX), so removing them is a bit of original work on our part.

Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 18:43, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Is revision 731491882 editorializing?

Hi.

I reverted five consecutive edits by 179.183.135.34 which contributed a sentence that was not a representation fact proportionately and as far as possible without bias, but a biased statement of the editor's own fears.

Now, I was thinking, am I right that it is an instance of editorializing?

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 07:29, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

This appears to be just random hate of some GPL fanatic for the MIT/BSD licensing not being "free software enough" for their personal preference. You could write such a remark under any MIT/BSD licensed software, and I think MIT/BSD are pretty much unanimously accepted as "free software" licenses at this point - therefore, such specific criticisms of those licenses are completely out of the scope of this article and should be sourced in the respective articles about those specific licenses, not this one instance of software. 2003:72:8F3D:3900:62E3:27FF:FE14:BDE8 (talk) 22:45, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

The alleged performance issue

Hi.

There has a been contribution by User:Acyclic alleging that Visual Studio Code does not use CPU resources effectively. I have reverted it twice so far: Once because it was using the notoriously unreliable source The Register, which has a history of writing sensational stuff. The second time, Acyclic added another source, but I reverted because the contribution failed verification against the new source. Basically, only a URL had been changed; it was still saying the same sensational stuff.

But I am here to report a development since my last revert: I tried to write what this new source actually says, i.e. the issue occurring on macOS Sierra only. But I realized that the new source is actually self-published. In other words, there is no telling whether this issue happens to one person or a group large enough to give the Wikipedia coverage due weight. (Just for the record, the issue cannot be reproduced on my Windows computer.)

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 04:16, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

It is not cool to remove sourced content. You are welcome to edit it to better suit the source. Basically, there are comments on the page verifying its accuracy. It is not some false b/s that someone made up, although it seems you might like if that were true. Of course it cannot be reproduced on your Windows system. Microsoft is known all too well to intentionally cripple software on non-Windows operating systems. --Acyclic (talk) 23:22, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

"It is not cool to remove sourced content." Our policy says otherwise. Sources must be reliable and must attest to what is written. Neither is the case here.

"[...] there are comments on the page verifying its accuracy. It is not some false b/s..." But you are not saying what those comments are saying. So, yes, what you wrote is false b/s.

"[...] although it seems you might like if that were true. I don't cut my nose to spite my face.

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 04:25, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

What the telemetry consists of

[1]

Some wants to know what's inside Microsoft's telemetry, and didn't have the expertise to read the source code. (Maybe did, but didn't see the source because of this.)

I checked the source code and I see a lot of telemetry points, like thousands. Is it encyclopedic to include them all? i.e. WP:IINFO?

Basic stuff that they collect are version number, OS, platform, first session date and time, last session date and time, startup time, things like that. 5.78.237.10 (talk) 12:37, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Also, they are tracking every single click and key press. 2003:C4:EF30:1C00:54C2:B838:5C47:75A8 (talk) 22:03, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

They do not. YannickFran (talk) 06:47, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

VSCodium

There is an Opensource clone of Visual Studio Code - VSCodium (without the proprietary telemetry/tracking), as of 2020-08-20 Microsoft Defender SmartScreen report VSCodium as Unsafe and prevented it from download and install from VSCodium website.

References

This is not suitable for the article lead. Perhaps with improvements it would fit into the article elsewhere. — MaxEnt 18:00, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

It's not notable to any extend. We're not going around listing recompilations of every app because they may or may not include telemetry. --84.194.198.206 (talk) 08:15, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

I think VSCodium deserves to be a separate chapter on the Visual Studio Code page, probably under Data collection. --Alexey Vazhnov (talk) 11:56, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

It is very notable, you can see that by googling. It is even more notable than ungoogled-chromium (measuring by search results), a Chromium fork with similar motives that is referenced in the Chromium page. VSCodium has 17.6k stars on GitHub right now. VSCode is the most popular IDE, and VSCodium is the most popular FOSS distribution of it, and it is quite popular. If the article does not mention it, it is incomplete. Your tone ("...not notable to any extend.", "...may or may not include...") shows that you are biased. 123popos123 (talk) 13:45, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

On Wikipedia, 'notable' does not mean google hits or social media likes. See WP:N. We'd need reliable sources to use to source the information. MrOllie (talk) 14:20, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

VSCodium is not a fork, from VSCodium's own website:

When we build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.

As VSCodium is barely notable to begin with, I'm removing the "Forks" section since it's factually incorrect and off topic. If VSCodium has any place in this article it's as a passing mention in a larger discussion about telemetry and possible controversy surrounding that.

Nickelpro (talk) 04:49, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

I have once again cleaned up this article's overabundance of references to Codium. As a simple compile this really isn't noteworthy at all, even if it was an actual proper fork of the project, especially not to the point where it is being inserted everywhere in the article. There are even a number of sentences that seemed to just randomly bring up that Code's binaries aren't "open" just to be able to turn it all back to Codium. Or even inserting it into the info card... Come on... It reads like an ad for a project this article isn't about.--YannickFran (talk) 10:30, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

VS Code Market Share Update request

I want to learn the latest market share percentages in 2020 September. I think it will be make more clear to understand what is going on that ecosystem and who uses VS Code and why uses VS Code. -- MertGor (talk) 00:41, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

"is a free software" → "is a freeware software"

I love when an encyclopedia avoids any possible confusion. In this case in the first section we have that boring possible confusion between freeware and free software. I would like to change the first section accordingly to the subject. It's not that big change, but I would like to discuss it first. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 10:37, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

Both forms are grammatically wrong. "Software" is uncountable. The second form (proposed) is bloated too; "freeware" is already software.

The article is already doing a much better job:

Visual Studio Code's source code comes from Microsoft's free and open-source software VSCode project released under the permissive Expat License,^[8] and the compiled binaries are freeware for any use.^[9]

One of the properties of free software is that anyone is free to do anything with them, even creating non-free derivatives. In this case, Microsoft has used that freedom to release non-free binaries to protect its brand and its users against malicious Chinese-style scumming.

Waysidesc (talk) 18:04, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

An IDE?

Visual Studio Code is not an integrated development environment (IDE). It's a text editor. Should the first sentence of the page be edited then? Gotoro (talk) 16:25, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

The 'built-in' distinction is a one pushed by pedants. It's an IDE that has a great plugin architecture which allows you to slim-down your experience as much as you want. But what if 90% of people use it with those said plugins with feature parity (or at least the ones they want) of all the traditional IDEs and Microsoft themselves call it an IDE on many of their pages. The pedants will push the 'built-in'='text-editor' point to an absurdity (btw the IDE wiki page makes no such distinction) even if almost everyone uses all the defining features of an IDE but had to install them. It's silly. 108.28.67.209 (talk) 00:45, 8 June 2023 (UTC)