Official download at https://code.visualstudio.com/license has bogus, lengthy legalese additional license although project is easily available under MIT here

[ghost]

Official download at https://code.visualstudio.com/license has bogus, lengthy legalese additional license although project appears to be easily available under just the much shorter MIT licensing from here. This is shady behavior and encourages people to make unofficial packages which do exactly the same but risk incompatibilities just to escape the useless waste of additional legalese terms to agree to.

Why not just make the official version be exactly under the MIT license, and then just offer optional feedback features that don't require ten pages of additional terms to agree to?? That's just silly.

[bgse]

As far as I know the Microsoft-branded build (the one which has the Visual Studio logo and such) does have the extra terms, while the opensource vscode-oss build (the one you get when building from this repo, and has the vscode-oss logo) has MIT.

Basically, there is an officially packaged and branded version by Microsoft, and there is the opensource version everyone can build from the sources.

Disclaimer: This might be completely wrong, just is how I understand it.

[ghost]

I am making this ticket not because I don't understand the thing they have done with that separate build, but simply to remark that it seems like a bad idea to have such an extra build. As I said, it drives people to make their own unofficial build just to avoid that.

Personally I sure lost interest in the branded one once I saw that lengthy page of legal stuff for an MIT open-source project I was supposed to agree to. No thanks. Does Microsoft want people to make extra unofficial builds because theirs sucks/is overly corporate legalese for no good reason? That seems like a bad thing. It seems like asking for future confusion caused by separate spawned forks created just to provide proper end-user builds that don't suck due to unnecessary complicated legal terms slapped on top.

[Tyriar]

Yes @bgse you're correct, you can see #60 (comment) for a detailed write up on the issue.

[ghost]

Well I guess that means it's not going to be changed. What a shame...

You should at least consider also putting pre-built packages here on github as downloads which don't have this annoying licensing on top that nobody needs.