https://sneak.berlin/20200307/the-case-against-microsoft-and...
VS Code has had to fork to remove the unethical spyware portions within it placed there by Microsoft:
I realize this is just pure anecdata and not a legitimately researched observation, but I don't know a single dev in real life who either switched away from Github or VSCode due to those concerns, despite having a wide variety of dev friends from all kinds of backgrounds, including big tech devs, non-tech company devs, fully remote devs, self-taught devs, small startup devs, outside of the US devs, freelancer devs, etc.
"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"
When a certain build configuration enables major spyware features, and that is the build configuration for the released version by the first party, and another build configuration (that is not released by the first party) disables those major spyware features, the distinction between a fork/patch and a "different build configuration" becomes semantically meaningless.
It's a fork, regardless of how they care to present it. The result of the build configuration is embedded in the release. Consider it a "binary fork" if you don't like considering json "source code".