Selling binaries is a something even GPL foresees. You can view telemetry as the price: if the product is free, you are the product. This has become a predominant business modell since most users seem unwilling to pay for sth that you can get for free. Sure MS won't need the money but I guess the dev team will probably have to still provide such kind of value. What would IMHO conflict with free software is however not the presence of telemetry but the lacking presence of it in the public sources (if that is true at all, often this even has to be removed by community forks). Is telemetry actually so intrasparent in the official sources?

> This has become a predominant business modell since most users seem unwilling to pay for sth that you can get for free.

I paid for my Android phone. Google is still collecting every piece of my life and my family's.

You paid for the physical hardware. You’re free to install AOSP on it if you’d like.

As far as I can tell, most people are not free to install AOSP on hardware they have paid for since the bootloader is locked.

Even those who purchase hardware where the bootloader can be unlocked, it takes much deeper technical knowledge to install a third party OS than, say, a third party OS on a PC. And that is assuming someone else built the OS for you.

You bought the car. You're free to put whatever fuel in it that you like, but anything other than our own Super Xtreme CarFuel Plus is not supported (and will likely total your vehicle).

A bit more seriously: there are shades of grey. Just because they gave you something for what you paid doesn't mean it was a) fair, nor b) what was (effectively) advertised. Legalese around "you really just bought X" doesn't necessarily put everything in the clear.

i.e. when you buy an Android phone, it seems reasonable for people to expect that to come with a functioning Android-based OS. Just because you can install a different OS on it doesn't mean the default one isn't subject to criticism.

I see it something akin to the smart tv market where you buy the hardware but it also collects and uses data about everything you watch. The data collection aspect allows them to sell you that tv for less than they would if it were a "dumb" tv.

Nobody is free to install AOSP unless you want to lose your warranty.

Most of the extensions are open source and you can see the telemetry being collected, which is used to understand feature usage and diagnose bugs. The suggestion (with no evidence) that the telemetry is somehow insidious is FUD.

Right we've caught, let's see… {a thousand companies (including MS), governments around the word, and associated criminals} with their hand in the cookie-jar, over and over and over again, yet there's "no evidence." Billion-dollar databroker businesses non-withstanding. MS was first in line for the NSA as well.

I don't think all the telemetry is particularly useful, but there is no reason to give MS the benefit of the doubt here.

I don't totally agree with you on this. Telemetry on open source extension is public and opt-out, but it is neither on the MS VSCode builds or proprietary extensions. Additionally, I just can't believe that Microsoft uses telemetry data just for bug fixing, even without evidences, but that's only my opinion.

> The open core model is when a product is open source and extensions are paid and proprietary. The extensions often include features that are essential to the usage of said product.

Outside of the paid part, that's precisely what Microsoft is doing. MS publishes a couple of proprietary extensions for VS code.

That's not open core. You're not prevented from using those proprietary extensions, are you? Those extensions aren't "open source", they have nothing to do with VSCode being "open core".

We are. These extensions have light DRM and they only work on the original VSCode release, which you paid with telemetry for.

I turn off all the telemetry in the VSCode settings. Are there switches I can’t turn off or something?

How can you know if the switches actually work?

I could check using a proxy or by inspecting the source (it’s just JavaScript) but I don’t actually care about it that much to bother and I think we would have heard something if the switches were bogus, given that VSCode telemetry is such a contentious issue. That’s why I asked if there was other telemetry without a switch, because Windows is like that.

You're stretching what "paid with" means (just like with the meaning of "open core"). I'll step out of this conversation now.

Feel free to ignore me. But let me explain:

VSCode does not work at all for me without the "Remote SSH" extension. And the "Remote SSH" extension is proprietary and DRM-ed to be not work with the open source code.

I don't see how I'm stretching what "open core" means. This is just like any other open core stuff.

"Paid for" part, yeah you are right. I thought the orange site all agree I paid for Gmail, just not with money, but turns out I'm wrong.

> There's nothing "open core" about Microsoft shipping binaries with telemetry.

I don't get what telemetry has to do with open source? It's entirely possible to ship a binary that is 100% "open source" - that is reproducible from OSS code - but still has telemetry.

Unless Microsoft views telemetry features to be an extension itself