Visual Studio Code

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Visual Studio Code is an integrated development environment developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, macOS and web browsers.

Visual Studio Code

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

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 proprietary under the "Microsoft Software License" and ships with closed-source modifications.

Alternate fully open source forks exists like VS Codium.

Market Control

Visual Studio Code (Also known as VS Code) is widely used upon. with over 50 million develoupers using it as of May 15th, 2025, But the control varies, Due to the software being open-source, Users may switch to other forks, such as previously mentioned '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 that introduced functionality to entirely disable the extension under the condition that it was running inside of a third-party fork of the editor, displaying an error 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."