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GitBook hasn't been open source since October 2018 (https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook) and software is usually judged by its most recent version. GitBook in its current form is a proprietary web service.
VSCodium does exclude the proprietary features of Visual Studio Code, but I don't see how that should disqualify VSCodium from being open source. In fact, I use VSCodium frequently and I am satisfied with its feature set. VSCodium is also maintained by someone who is not employed by Microsoft, so I don't think it's fair to say that it is intentionally designed to be inferior to Visual Studio Code.
> VSCodium is not "designed" to be less functional, since it is a project maintained by developers who are unaffiliated with Microsoft.
In today's (OSS) world, employment or affiliation doesn't matter much. Microsoft can propose what they want and get what they want from the project, at the end of the day. I don't think these independent maintainers have power to say "No" (if a VSCodium developer can chime in here, I'd love to be stand corrected), or they risk VSCodium to be forked to VSCodiumX, by developers who are friendlier to the megacorp which loves Linux.
Yes, VSCodium is a node to Chromium. "-ium" has a ring akin to "-ish" in today's conjecture. Freemium - Free-ish but not. Chromium - Chrome-ish but not. VSCodium - VSCode-ish, but not. This might be curse in the naming, but it feels like that, at least for me.
The blog post I linked quotes a tweet which supports what I'm saying, heck even the blog post does a much better job of detailing what I was trying to say here in my previous comments.
To circle back, the problem with -ium projects are, they are effectively banned from participating in the main ecosystem which drives these projects forward, and to be in "The Ecosystem", you need to use the closed source versions with pervasive data collection and whatnot. Heck, even Google abuses Chromium with "Experiments and Proposals", which they use to politely yet forcefully push the web to the places they want. VSCodium is the same getaway drug and test vessel for Microsoft.
Lure with Open Source version, trap with closed source version for "Full Benefits" (for the company, because user is the product).
> You're entitled to your own opinion, but Atom was developed by GitHub...
Yes & yes.
> which was acquired by Microsoft.
Yes.
> It doesn't help that Atom was discontinued last year, with the final version having been released in March 2022
However, it's forked as Pulsar [0], which I meant by "current form" in my previous comment. Again, it's MIT licensed, and that's not my favorite, but at least it's not a company editor now.
Atom's original developers started to build Zed, which is worst of both worlds currently (Open source with a closed backend, plus "All your data belong to us" clause).
At the end of the day, from my perspective "-ium" projects and their sanitized versions are just open-core versions of the "main tools" developed from them.
Just because these versions somehow work, and have a permissive license doesn't make them open source in the meta sense. Pedantically they are open source software, yes, but they are just the "Open Core" or Demo/Shareware versions of the tools which companies use to strange to ecosystems.
This is just enshittification of open source in my eyes.
More power to you if you're happy with the -ium tools, but I'd rather use truly free software (Like Eclipse), or use completely honest closed source software (like BBEdit), instead of using tools designed to look like open source but not.
[0]: https://pulsar-edit.dev/