For what it's worth; Visual Studio Code and VSCode are not the same. VSCode is MIT licensed: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

From vscodium.com:

Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking. According to this comment from a Visual Studio Code maintainer:

When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.

When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license

The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. [VSCodium] includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.

What I find unfortunate is that VSCode and Visual Studio Code are so conflated. It's Visual Studio Code in the context of features, it's vscode in the context of license and community.

In this sense Zed is much cleaner as to what's up for for monetization. You look at the project and you know which parts will be candidates for business growth and which parts will stay in the community. With Visual Studio Code, the entire editor is game for monetization and utilization for Microsofts business goals, yet has the appearance of open source and community owned.

Microsoft are expert at hiding the strings. I prefer obvious strings if there have to be strings attached.

a very important difference is that MS doesn't let you use some of their quite nice language servers unless you're using VS Code, e.g. Pylance: https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/483

for this reason, the non-MS-built VS Code isn't equivalent to theirs, regardless of the license of the editor itself.

https://zed.dev/terms has the Zed Editor use license. That’s different from the Zed source code license.

End you’re not allowed to reverse engineer the editor even though it builds from open source. I wonder how much legal reasoning went into that decision. It might be boilerplate, or it might be necessary for some other part of the contract.

I don’t know. Technically, you can clean-room reverse engineer a GPL binary and your resulting code doesn’t have to be GPL. But you could also just build the open source repo and do that. So I don’t know