I mean, technically true, but from context we can infer they were referring to vscode, which is open source. Visual Studio Code is vscode + ms stuff, but at it's core the project is MIT, and has been recently forked by a lot of teams (cursor, void, that fruit scandal, etc).
Yet what "sells" about VSCode is the closed-source features, not the open source core. Everybody uses VScode today because of collaboration features and Copilot integration. VSCodium is very niche.
Citation needed? I use vscodium explicitly for its license, but my friends and coworkers who use vscode don't use collaboration features and copilot anyway and could use vscodium as well if they cared. What sells vscode is that it's a nice extensible cross platform IDE filling a niche between "just use vim" and "full blown jetbrains IDE for every language that you use".
> Whilst Visual Studio Code is "open-source" (as per the OSD) the value-add which transforms the editor into anything of value ("what people actually refer to when they talk about using VSCode") is far from open and full of intentionally designed minefields that often makes using Visual Studio Code in any other way than what Microsoft desires legally risky...
Do you by any chance work with Python? If i recall correctly, the default Python library for VSCode doesnt work out of the box in VSCodium, as its pulled from MS servers, which VSCodium does not allow. I think you need to enable this connectivity on your own. So my understanding is that by “crippling” the maket, its more convenient for people to just use VSCode.
GitHub is not open source.