Visual Studio Code

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Visual Studio Code

Basic Information
Release Year	2015
Product Type	Software
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://code.visualstudio.com

Visual Studio Code is a cross platform text and code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, macOS and web browsers.

Consumer impact summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

• User Freedom
• User Privacy
• Business Model
• Market Control

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Freedom

The source code is available on GitHub under the MIT License. However, the binaries published by Microsoft are licensed under the proprietary "Microsoft Software License" and ships with closed-source modifications, similar to how Google ships Chromium, their open source browser and Chrome, their flagship, proprietary browser built on top of Chromium but with various closed source modifications.

Alternative, fully open source forks exist, such as VS Codium.

Market Control

Visual Studio Code (Also known as VS Code) is widely used upon, with over 50 million developers using it as of May 15th, 2025. Due to the software being open source, users may switch to other forks such as VS Codium if they are not happy with Visual Studio Code's features.

Incidents

Telemetry enabled by default

Microsoft's proprietary build sends telemetry data by default which goes under Microsoft's Privacy Statement. It has to be disabled manually by setting telemetry.telemetryLevel to off in the user settings.

Blocking extensions for third-party forks

In April 2025, Microsoft pushed an update to the "C/C++" extension for Visual Studio Code (an extension that adds functionality such as better syntax highlighting) that introduced functionality that would intentionally disable the extension if it detected that it was running inside of a third-party fork of the editor, displaying an error message that says:

"The C/C++ extension may be used only with Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server, and successor Microsoft products and services to develop and test your applications."