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I am trying to understand the licensing limitations if I want to bundle code-server with my cloud application.

As per the docs, Out of the box, code-server is simply VS Code in the browser

Since code-server uses open source code of VS Code, how does the licensing terms of VS Code Server affect usage of code-server in a commercial application? As per VS Code Server FAQ and licensing terms -

  • hosting VS Code Server as a service is not allowed
  • you may not provide the software as a stand-alone offering or combine it with any of your applications for others to use, or transfer the software or this agreement to any third party.

So, if I ship code-server helm charts with my commercial cloud application, will it be breaking VS Code Server's license terms?

code-server is MIT licensed, and available for commercial use. Both code-server and VS Code Server uses open-source code from VS Code.

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nightlytrails
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  • Already a negative vote? May I know why? – nightlytrails Jun 07 '23 at 21:00
  • Could you explain why you think this question is on-topic here? As per the licensing terms you've linked to, this piece of software doesn't appear to be open source in any way. – Philip Kendall Jun 07 '23 at 21:28
  • I’m voting to close this question because it asks about conditions of combining two pieces of proprietary-licensed software – planetmaker Jun 08 '23 at 00:14
  • Im not clear whether the agpl Software is the same as commercially offered https://github.com/coder/coder Regatten or not, you can only make use of that version freely under terms of the agpl v3 – planetmaker Jun 08 '23 at 00:23
  • @Philip Kendall Not sure if you have visited the code-server github url before voting. code-server is a open-source software with MIT license – nightlytrails Jun 08 '23 at 04:18
  • @planetmaker - Both of them are open-source. At least some parts of it. Am asking the question because am not very clear. Why would have I asked if everything was clear to me. – nightlytrails Jun 08 '23 at 04:20
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    It appears that "code-server" (from Coder) and "VS Code Server" (from Microsoft) are two distinct software products, so yes they can have two distinct licenses. – Brandin Jun 08 '23 at 07:17
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    Related Q&A: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4288/is-microsoft-vs-code-really-open-source which explains the difference between the open source vscode and the non-open Visual Studio Code (i.e. from Microsoft). Yes, the Visual Studio Code official MS binary contains code from the open-source vscode, but that is allowed by the MIT license. MIT also allows you to add your own licensing conditions/restrictions if you want, so the fact that they don't allow you to host it as a service seems like a typical thing to do for a proprietary license. – Brandin Jun 08 '23 at 07:17
  • @nightlytrails just because some product incorporates open source components, that does not imply that the product itself is open source. Especially if a company owns the copyright on the code, they can easily issue a (feature-limited) open-source version and a proprietary version with additional features - regardless of the choice of open source license they use for their open-source offering. – planetmaker Jun 08 '23 at 07:38
  • @nightlytrails If they don't own the copyright, but use open-source components under a permissive license, they can still create a proprietary product without the need to disclose their code, and releasing it under whatever license they please - as long as they obey the license of the open-source components (which very roughly often boils down to acknowledging the copyright). MIT is such permissive license. I can take the code, state that I use it with copyright whoever wrote that, add my own code to it, and sell that under my own license. – planetmaker Jun 08 '23 at 07:40
  • @planetmaker - I understand that incorporating open-source code doesn't makes a product open-source itself. But that's the exact reason why am especially asking about the licensing terms of 'code-server' as I am interested in distributing it with my application. Its Github says MIT licensed, and can be used commercially. But just to double-check, I asked the question here, if I have understood the licensing terms correctly. May be, this community is only about opensource things. Where we cannot ask a question about a product being opensource or not. Anyways, thanks for the comments. – nightlytrails Jun 08 '23 at 12:19

1 Answers1

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So, if I ship code-server helm charts with my commercial cloud application, will it be breaking VS Code Server's license terms?

No. Despite the similarity in their names, code-server and VS Code Server are two distinct products. If you obtain the code-server product under the MIT license, you don't have to care about the licensing terms of other (similarly named) products. Even if those products actually share a lot of their codebase.

In the end, the only questions that matter are

  • what license terms were attached to the copy of the software that you received.
  • when providing a download link to others, does that link point to a copy that can legally be offered according to the license terms attached to it.
Bart van Ingen Schenau
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