[correct-horse]

It's free software in letter, but not in spirit. True free software doesn't lock out non-official builds for zero technical reasons.

[fragmede]

what about vscodium? for that reason, what was iceweasel?

[janice1999]

vscodium and VSCode forks are legally prevented from using the normal VSCode extension site. They have their own: https://open-vsx.org/

As far as I know Chrome forks are not blocked from using extensions from the Chrome Web Store.

[nicce]

There is some sort of vendor lock-in VSCode. It at least used to be extremely difficult to make GitHub Copilot to work with codium. There is something closed source in VSCode that makes the difference.

It was so difficult to maintain, that I ended up switching to VSCode. So the ”lock-in” worked.

[bigstrat2003]

The software is free, the extension site is not. I agree that's a shitty practice by MS, but it doesn't somehow make VSCode not free software.