> It's also not at all comparable to the repo for WSL in the top post (which is literally just a couple of text files, a handful of scripts, and a binary releas

> It's also not at all comparable to the repo for WSL in the top post (which is literally just a couple of text files, a handful of scripts, and a binary release - which I'd certainly agree is not really open source). "The source is right fucking there" too even in that case. Do you see that the point is how much of the product is actually open source versus how much is not? What I have said is that a lot of people overestimate how much of VS Code is open -- and this applies even to yourself: in your initial post you thought the only closed parts were "some which required 3rd party online services", but actually almost everything from the IDE is closed, even stuff like debugging that does not even remotely involve 3rd parties nor online services. You have been mislead by MS yourself, yet you still claim that what they're doing is not misleading. > I'm not really sure how you can possibly portray having the literal buildable source present as misleading. Yet you understand how the "WSL" example is misleading too. It's literally the same thing just moved even more to the extreme. They put some "source" which is literally a negligible portion of the binaries they ship. Sure it is buildable, otherwise it wouldn't even qualify as source. > Is it misleading that I can purchase binary software designed to run on my open source linux distro? This analogy is absolutely broken. First, the binary software would have to be 1st party. Second, the binary part should be practically larger than the otherwise open-source distro itself. Third, it would have to be required to use this binary software to do almost anything _of value_ with the distro itself. Fourth, the differences between the open source and closed source parts must be diffuse (e.g. shipped as part of the same binary package, automatically downloaded, at zero cost, etc.). And fifth, the distro must still advertise itself as a "open source" product. Then you would have the correct analogy.