Vscode is permissively licensed, but some of the Microsoft created extensions are proprietary, e.g. the C/C++ extension and the Pylance extension. They state in their license that they can only be used with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code and crash if you try to use them with VSCodium for example.
There are open source alternatives, the basedpyright extension is better than Pylance and I've heard the clangd extension is good.
It is violating the license terms of the official MS extensions like Pylance, C/C++ suite, Jupyter, remote development suite ...etc. They state that they must be used with the official release of the VSCode and not any fork.
If the club owner wants to have a fancy seat at the nicest table in the restaurant, that's not discrimination. It's their club. They built it. Everyone knows they built it, and they can think whatever they like about that fancy seat. If they want a similarly fancy seat, they can build their own club.
(Analogies aside, while I understand their rationale, it was wrong for Apple to lump the likes of Spotify and Netflix within their in-app purchase umbrella. And I also find it hilarious how people think 30% is highway robbery when 10+ years ago it was widely regarded as a fantastic deal for developers.)
Are you confused between open source and open development?
Isn't the source fully open?
Edit:
If I made a movie, and made the files freely available after I make it and let you do whatever you want with it
.. would you insist that it isn't "open" because you didn't see me argue with my editor or the 100 times I iterates on the end scene or whether your idea for chase sequence was not incorporated?
You can't even install the resulting binaries of an opensource Android build on a phone because of gaps. And even if you could (or fill in the gaps) Google poisoned the ecosystem by ensuring almost all Android apps require Google Play services. Which aren't open source and you realistically need for all Android apps.
So no, Google made sure there is no open source Android. There are just some (incomplete) source dumps.
I'm not talking about the Google Maps app or the YouTube app here. I'm talking about the API's which Google Play services offer which all apps use. API's which for example allows your app to get the location of the user. Or allows your app to be updated.
Simply said probably none of the apps you installed on your phone are going to work without Google Play services installed. Google Play services are closed source. Which is why manufactures like Samsung need to sign a contract with Google and can't simply "install opensource Android". Samsung could live without Google Maps being installed and they could even live without the Google play store but they can't live with none of your apps (like your bank app, your Netflix app, etc.) working.
> Can you name an OS that gives more support to OEMs than Android?
I don't see how this is relevant for this discussion? The whole point is that Android is only opensource in name. You must license Google Play services from Google otherwise Android is practically useless since you can't run 99.9% of the Android apps. When you license Google Play services Google will also impose all kinds of other restrictions on you which have nothing to do with Google Play services. Like for example mandating you don't set Perplexity AI as the default...
Imagine Microsoft "open-sourcing" Windows (by doing some source drops at regular intervals) but you wouldn't be able to run all the existing Windows applications on it without licensing closed source software and online services from Microsoft.
Why can’t I as a laptop manufacturer decide to install a different default browser on Windows for my devices? Or change the start menu?
The phone manufacturer can choose to ship another OS.
Now sure there is absolutely an argument about their monopoly causing other apps to not be compatible on your own custom os but the same argument applies to windows and the only way to make apps run on linux is through an emulation/compatibility layer and even then it might not work.
So by that argument Microsoft should also be taken up for antitrust, which Im all for but I doubt thats going to happen.
> Imagine Microsoft "open-sourcing" Windows (by doing some source drops at regular intervals) but you wouldn't be able to run all the existing Windows applications on it without licensing closed source software and online services from Microsoft.
In case of Android and Google Play services that is never going to work reliably. Your users will experience breakage on a regular interval and you will make yourself wildly unpopular with app developers (since they will be getting the bug reports of the subtle incompatibilities). Probably to a point where they might just block their app from running on your phone.
All this stuff works on paper but it is going to be a constant up hill battle which you will loose in the end because your users will become fed-up with the constant needling of broken stuff and having to wait for you to fix it. It similar to using Wine on Linux. It works _a lot_ of the time but not all the time.
If you want to experience using reverse engineered Google play services, try an Android phone (or emulator) with microG on it [1].
building your own services doesn't help any existing app OSes live and die from 3rd party apps so unless you can convince 10k developers to port their apps to a platform with no users, you're dead in the water
+1. The entitlement on some of these people are out of the world. There's a perfectly capably operating system being made freely available for everyone, but nope - they want the source code of google maps, google search or whatever.
It sure is. Open source doesn't require open development model or even taking outside contributions. It simply requires that you have access to the source and can do things like fork it, which you absolutely can with Android. I think people android to be more like Linux, but that's a very difficult arrangement and has tradeoffs.
I'm not familiar with the specific process. I've heard various claims that Android is not independently buildable, though existence of alternate Android builds suggests otherwise.
Taking the original claim at face value, viz "No they changed their development process to do it behind closed doors and release the code after final release" (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43778333>), then no, the process isn't Open Source.
The argument then becomes not one of definition (law) but of the facts of the case. Again: I cannot make a determination here, but your haranging wordofx appears misdirected and weakens your case. That's not saying you're not correct, but you're coming across poorly and unpersuasively.
You're continuing to argue fact as if you're arguing law, which again, greatly weakens your overall argument, in addition to being needlessly confrontational and aggressive.
Free Software Foundation General Public License version 2:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.
That's generally interpreted to mean that the build environment or build system is included in the requirements of the licence. This is included in FSF's Free Software Definition as well:
Answering your question then, no, source absent build prerequisites / systems does not satisfy either FSF's Free Software Definition or the subsequent Open Source Definition by the Open Source Initiative.
We can't make proclamations like "we can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'" either.
Of course there are people who prefer any conceivable style you might bring up. That doesn't mean there can't be legitimate strengths and weaknesses between them, up to the point where "this is bad" is an accurate shorthand for "on most metrics of interest, this design is worse than its competitors."
People get up in arms about plenty of stuff that doesn't matter. Sometimes it's a matter of taste and the preferences are spread widely. Sometimes it's down to familiarity; "OMG CHANGE!" is a real thing. Sometimes it's a pet peeve that hardly anyone cares about. But that doesn't mean there can't be legitimate bases for comparison and opinions.
UX people complain, often rightly, that they receive excessive and unfounded abuse for decisions that are a matter of debatable preference. Abuse is bad. Opinions can be excessive or ill-conceived or reactive or abusive or whatever. But the pendulum has swung so far now that any complaints about UX are automatically dismissed as irrelevant and problematic. It doesn't matter whether you have a well-founded argument for your opinion; your opinion is unwanted and every word of your argument, every point you make, is seen as only proving that you're a jerk and a crank. "Trust the UX people." "It's not fair to complain about something when you're not the expert and they are." Yeah, whatever. I'm a user, and if I'm having trouble using, that should matter to someone who has some say.
I'm not saying Google invented any or all of these but it sounds like you don't like it the colors or font but that's different from your larger point.
Show me an instance where Google's UI is radically different from industry norms and then you'll have a point.
Some of this shit is complex and complex things look complex.
Brave takes open source chromium code, which is majority funded by Google, and adds things on top of it.
People underestimate how expensive it is to build a browser. There's a reason why we have only 3 major engines. Firefox (struggling), Chromium (Google backed) and Safari (Apple backed)
We have made the web far too complicated, and attempted to replicate a world of other programming paradigms into what was intended to be a remote folder browsing API
Isn't the situation similar to Brave et al built on top of Chromium but supports Chrome extensions?