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.
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.
for this reason, the non-MS-built VS Code isn't equivalent to theirs, regardless of the license of the editor itself.
If software being FLOSS is in any way an important value of yours, the difference between Zed and Visual Studio Code is night and day:
Zed's GPL: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/LICENSE-GPL MS Visual Studio Code's license: https://code.visualstudio.com/license
I believe this alone shows much more good will towards developers and much less strings attached.