The binary they (microsoft) provide is under a different, proprietary license and contains code that we cannot see that is not open source. When pressed on the

The binary they (microsoft) provide is under a different, proprietary license and contains code that we cannot see that is not open source. When pressed on the issue, they say it is for "patent concerns" which is laughable for obvious reasons. The deeper you dig on this, the sketchier Microsoft's stance seems. There were a lot of pissed off people on their github about a year ago basically demanding that they fix this discrepancy, but they did not bow to the pressure whereas in other cases (i.e. being urged by the OSS community to rename GVFS) they do bow to such pressure, which raises the question why is this so important to them when the entire point of vscode is to have good PR in the OSS and developer communities. Long story short, whatever they are putting in that binary that isn't in the OSS version, they really, really don't want to take out. But I bet at the end of the day it's for some boring beuracratic reason rather than something sinister.