> AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be used by these agents. reply

I always wonder how this works legally. VSCode needs to comply with the LGPL (it's based on Chromium/Blink which is LGPL) ; they should provide the entire sources that allow us to rebuild our own "official" VSCode binary

I think that MS provides these extensions as plugins. The core of VSCode is OSS, it's the extra bits that have a different license.

Could you give an example of what they're gatekeeping for Copilot exclusively? I'm kinda confused because Copilot in VS Code isn't exactly a powerhouse of unique features in my experience, it still feels well behind Roo/Kilo Code in most ways I can think of, although much closer to the competition than it was a year ago.

> AI UI

2026: every day ...

I was going to ask why all these companies choose to fork the entire IDE rather than just writing an extension like every other sane developer, and this response is the most believable reason why.

But Microsoft made VSCode lol, I think being able to gatekeep things like that shouldn’t allow a billion dollar company just reuse all of your code instead of making their own IDE

Most of VSCode (yes, most) is a mishmash of other OSS products, including Google Chromium! By that logic VSCode itself shouldn't exist.

That does make sense.

Has (kinda) not been true for half a year

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/05/19/openSourceAIE...