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> The broad theme is: if 100% of the functionality of the software is inside a closed-source compiled binary, should it be false advertisement to say it is "open source."

I get it. I disagree that it's false advertising, though I do agree it could be scummy. For instance, if MS created a combination package, licensed that package as MIT, whereas the important bits were proprietary.

Maybe any conflation of licenses have since been scrubbed from the marketplace, but from what I see on their license pages right now, I'm not sure MS's behavior rises to scummy. The Python package makes pretty clear it includes pylance, and pylance makes clear it's not MIT licensed.

> I don't know if cpptools' functionality is 100% closed; in reality there are three other licenses you must agree-to within a repository that is supposedly MIT licensed.

It should be well known by now vscode-cpptools and vscode-python are partially closed, which is good enough as closed, which is good enough as BSL, etc. If it's not clear, then that's a failure of the open source community and alternatives to make it clear. The license links seem pretty clear to me. Perhaps it would be better if the situation were made even clearer, like a badge for OSI licensed packages, but it's not yours or my store.

My God's honest feeling is transparency and building better stuff is really the only remedy. You either believe in the FOSS development model or you don't. You either have a strong open source language community or you don't. If the C++ or Python OSS people can't muster an alternative, it's not MS's fault for building a better mouse trap which only works with MS products.

There is this overwhelming desire in FOSS communities to works the refs, or even FUD wrong-thinking projects, instead of saying: "They have a development model and so do we. We believe ours is better." Python, in particular, has so much interesting language server stuff going on in Rust (see Ruff and pylyzer). Re: C++, clangd is apparently very good too. It stinks for the ecosystem that MS has acted this way, but I think one just needs to very clear about whose fault it is when something breaks, or when someone can't use an MS extension, because it's obviously MS's fault.




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