Per the release blog post (https://www.gitpod.io/blog/openvscode-server-launch), the goal of OpenVSCode Server is to make as few changes to VS Code as possible to run it on the server, while code-server makes more opinionated changes:

> Unlike other attempts, this project is based on a minimal set of changes and uses the same architecture that powers both Gitpod and GitHub Codespaces at scale.

Johannes from Gitpod here. I've answered this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682477 (copied below)

Essentially, we run nightly builds at OpenVSCode Server making it as upstream to VS Code as possible. In contrast to other forks the whole scope of the project is to add a minimal set of changes (specifics about what we added https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server/blob/main/doc...)

The architecture we use powers both Gitpod and GitHub Codespaces. Several of the devs and organisations that have asked for our implementation & now have adopted OpenVSCode Server referenced the following issue at Code-Server (https://github.com/cdr/code-server/issues/3835).

Oh hey, I sold them that github account name for 0.11 BTC. They obviously had deep pockets but I wondered whether they'd end up having any success.