When most companies say free they mean free of charge, if they want to say open source they say open source, because that’s the term the world understands. Basically only the FSF uses free to mean Free Software.
Yeah, I know, that’s my point. The distinction is the reason companies don’t like to use confusing terms: “free” has only one meaning for them in the context of software.
> "Free software" and "open source software" are two terms for the same thing: software released under licenses that guarantee a certain, specific set of freedoms.
> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software” to show we do not mean it is gratis.
Many companies use "open source" or simply "open" in a way that isn't compatible with the open source definition. This is known as open washing. A good, non-Microsoft example is Epic Games and Unreal Tournament 4. They talk a lot about being "open", but the source code and assets are all proprietary.
Visual Studio Code is already built on top of a number of open source projects we've created or are contributing to, including the Roslyn compiler and language tools, OmniSharp, Typescript, and GitHub Electron. We are still in an early stage and we're evolving our architecture - and we'll look at what we open source, and how we do it, as part of that.
It's free as in beer only. Please do not use it if you care about software freedom, and urge Microsoft to respect you by releasing the source code under a free license.
Not sure why this comment is getting a down vote, this is a very important issue. I understand a lot of startups get money from Microsoft, and a lot more use their products, but that doesn't make this less of an issue.
Down votes for pointing this out? Must be Microsoft employees or partners. Wish HN had a way of filtering votes given the source domain. I have the karma, but the chilling effect on new users could be nontrivial.
Looks like it's just free as in beer for now. Who knows what will happen a few months/years from now when it doesn't have a huge userbase and Microsoft isn't interested in continuing to support it alone.
Yeah, and while I appreciate their efforts... I find their documentation on their Azure clients for node.js too sparse and inconsistent. It can definitely be better, at least now I can look through their codebase to get what I need.
