I’m a big fan of Visual Studio Code — also commonly known as VS Code. I’m not a coder, but it’s long been my writing tool of preference, above all others.
One of VS Code’s big pulls is that it’s open source. You know that it is because it proudly declares this on its website, and it appears in its tagline as “The open source AI code editor.”
Sounds good, right? Well, except for the fact that it’s not accurate, and the version of VS Code you’re using isn’t really open source.
It’s all about the difference between licenses and language
Code is open source, but the software isn’t
It essentially comes down to licensing. Microsoft’s VS Code source code is open source, licensed under the permissive MIT license, which basically allows you to do anything you want with the source code.
However, the actual software product, Visual Studio Code, is licensed using Microsoft’s Software License, a proprietary standard it uses that includes tracking, telemetry, and so on. It’s also partly behind VS Code’s massive extensions marketplace, where you can find almost any extension you can think of. These extensions are one of the key components that make VS Code such a powerful tool.
Microsoft doesn’t hide the source code away or anything. You can see it on the VS Code GitHub. It’s just that there is a difference between the so-called clean, open-source code you can download and the final product it presents as its “open source” tool.
In that, if you go to the VS Code GitHub and download the source code, you end up with what’s known as Code-OSS, the cleaned-up, MIT-licensed version of the code base, without Microsoft’s tracking and such. It also lacks the support for Microsoft’s VS Code marketplace that makes the software so useful. Ultimately, you end up with very different software.
The real open-source version is VS Codium
Properly open-source
There is another option entirely: use a truly open-source version of VS Code. The open-source app you’re looking for is VS Codium, a “community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code.”
VS Codium is basically the answer. It brings almost every feature from VS Code into a fully open-source end-product, and most importantly, it supports most of the extensions, too. I couldn’t find all of the extensions I use in VS Code in VS Codium, but I easily found ones that replicated the specific behavior. As said, my needs as a writer are somewhat limited, so your mileage may vary, but I was happy with the number of extensions available.
Microsoft’s in-house apps are one of the biggest losses. You won’t find GitHub Copilot in VS Codium, because it’s Microsoft’s tool. There are replacements and workarounds, though, such as Qodo (formerly Codium), Claude Code, and plenty of others.
Similarly, as both editors are built from the same codebase, there is a lot of crossover in terms of features. So, VS Code’s coding auto-complete tool, IntelliSense, is available in VS Codium, as are Git-based versioning tools, debugging environments, syntax highlighting across multiple languages, and so on.
The biggest difference, though, is that VS Codium is far more lightweight than VS Code. Without all of the proprietary tracking and telemetry code included in the original, I found VS Codium opening faster, seeming more responsive, and generally consuming fewer resources. For example, a quick look in Task Manager with both apps open, with the same file and very similar extensions showed VS Codium using 300MB less memory. It’s a big difference that adds up in large files or as you add more extensions.
I built a local coding AI for VS Code and it’s shockingly good
There’s a better way to code with AI than those pesky online subscriptions.
Then there is the privacy side of the conversation. While VS Code is never mooted as a privacy risk, the term “open source” comes with a strong nod to a lack of telemetry and tracking, which, for VS Code, isn’t accurate. I’m not calling VS Code a huge privacy issue; it’s simply not true. But many folks would understandably prefer not to hand Microsoft any more data than necessary, and that can be avoided by switching to VS Codium.
Can’t leave VS Code? You can turn off some of the telemetry
It’s better than nothing
I get that some folks are locked into using VS Code. If that’s you and you didn’t realize that Microsoft collects telemetry data in VS Code, and you don’t like what you’ve read, you disable it.
- Head to VS Code’s Settings
- Input telemetry in the search bar
- Under the Telemetry: Telemetry Level section, select Off
You’re good to go.
Overall, VS Code is still a great tool, and I’m not suggesting you up-sticks and move without thought. But if you’ve been operating under the assumption that VS Code is open source in the full sense of the phrase — that you’re running software with the same freedoms as the code it came from — that assumption is wrong.
The project is open source. The product you downloaded is proprietary software with telemetry on by default. And VS Codium exists precisely for that reason.
