Is the VS Code Extention open source?

Hey, I was just wondering if the VS Code Extension was/is open source?

When visiting the GitHub repo, there’s only a quick start guide and that’s it… nothing else.

Hey @charliea21,

The Visual Studio Code Glitch extension is not open-source on any open-source platform for now.
But open-sourcing the Visual Studio Code extension of Glitch is a work in progress and Glitch staff are working on precisely to open-source the project.

Here are a few of the reasons the extension is not open-source right now:

  • The extension uses Glitch server APIs that are still subject to change and not publicly documented. Making the code open source sort of implies that those APIs are stable and might encourage developers to start experimenting with them. We’re not quite ready for that and don’t want to wind up pulling the rug out from under people.

  • We wouldn’t be able to support contributors well:

  • The build and test systems aren’t documented well enough for public consumption.

  • Running the test suite without access to Glitch internal tools hasn’t really been thought through.

  • The product is new and we are still iterating on the high-level design, feature set, etc. pretty briskly. If there are aspects of that we don’t want to discuss publicly, it means potentially telling someone “we are not going to merge your totally reasonable and well executed pull request but also will not tell you why”, which isn’t a position we want to put ourselves in.

Reported by dluxemburg
Kind Regards.

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Hmm, okay.

Looks like it won’t be open source at all.

Appears to be purposely minified to stop people understanding how it even works, which from an open-source platform is a bit disappointing indeed.

What I mean:

(There aren’t just libraries, the whole code is minified)

Compared to source of other random VS Code extensions, this is the only minified one (excluding 3rd party libraries).

As mentioned above, it is not supposed to be visible since the code contains API paths (which is not publicized yet), unstable API, unsupportable contributor, undocumented builds, and lastly, The product is new and we are still iterating on the high-level design, feature set, etc. (as pointed out).

Anyhow, I’d love to see the extension open-source on GitHub, so that the users can contribute to the code.

I can understand what they mean. However, the extension is basically propriety software running in an open source IDE. I’m probably going to stick with the painful GitHub import/export. I never usually trust non open-source software (and I never will) as for all you and I know, there could be some backdoor. Which Glitch would hopefully not put in.

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Hello. It’s good to hear that there is interest in open sourcing the extension. As mentioned above, we aren’t quite there yet.

One small note about “proprietary software in an open source IDE” though. Microsoft’s distribution of VS Code isn’t entirely open source either. From the GitHub readme:

Visual Studio Code is a distribution of the Code - OSS repository with Microsoft specific customizations released under a traditional Microsoft product license.

(You might prefer VSCodium, which is a distribution built directly from the publicly available source.)

Some of Microsoft’s own flagship extensions are in a similar situation as ours, such as the remote development tool they released in May (also with a no-code repo). Other companies have taken this approach as well.

This is not intended to change your mind about what tools to use, just to say that we understand VS Code as a platform to be a sort of a hybrid ecosystem and don’t see the Glitch extension as injecting a type of ownership or exclusivity into a place where it hadn’t existed.

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