Visual Studio Code

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

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Visual Studio Code is an integrated development environment 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 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 developers using it as of May 15th, 2025^[1], 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^[2] 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^[3], 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."^[4]^[5]

References

↑ https://developer.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-developers-the-journey-of-visual-studio-and-visual-studio-code (Archived)
↑ "Telemetry". VS Code Documentation. Archived from the original on 19 Dec 2025.
↑ Claburn, Thomas (2025-04-24). "Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks". The Register. Archived from the original on 18 Feb 2026.
↑ "VSCodium issues". "Microsoft C/C++ Extension appears to no longer support unofficial forks of VS Code". Archived from the original on 5 Apr 2025.
↑ "Cursor issues". "Has the VSCode C/C++ Extension been blocked?". Archived from the original on 25 Jun 2025.

[1] ttps://developer.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-developers-the-journey-of-visual-studio-and-visual-studio-code (Archived)

[2] "Telemetry". VS Code Documentation. Archived from the original on 19 Dec 2025.

[3] Claburn, Thomas (2025-04-24). "Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks". The Register. Archived from the original on 18 Feb 2026.

[4] "VSCodium issues". "Microsoft C/C++ Extension appears to no longer support unofficial forks of VS Code". Archived from the original on 5 Apr 2025.

[5] "Cursor issues". "Has the VSCode C/C++ Extension been blocked?". Archived from the original on 25 Jun 2025.

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