this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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What do you mean about VSCodium? Obviously it's just a differently compiled version of Microsoft's text editor, but what does Microsoft have to do with it, otherwise?
it's effectively the same as chrome vs chromium. google/microsoft invests the resources to develop it, and someone simply comes and forks it without the closed source parts or telemetry.
which is fine, but means they still get to dictate how the software works. the best real world example i have is chrome and adblockers, or google-made web "standards".
Yeah. For instance, how many forks of Chome/Chromium have rejected Google’s Manifest v3 changes? Zero, because they’re all soft forks and don’t have the resources to hard fork.
Both Edge and Brave still support Manifest V2.
That’s good to hear.
Edge is proprietary and Microsoft has deep pockets, which explains how they’re able to do this. I wouldn’t assume they’ll continue to do this, and no one can fork their code should they switch to Manifest v3.
Brave seems to have managed to both remain open source and maintain several revenue streams that add up to quite a lot.
Edit to add: Brave’s Manifest v2 support appears to be limited, and Microsoft has already started their planned retirement of Manifest v2.
Didn't Vivaldi? I don't really use them cause I mostly avoid non-FOSS software, but I seem to remember them announcing they'd be keeping support.
“Otherwise” is doing Herculean lifting here when the code is nearly 100% Microsoft. The way they control it is by changing VSCode’s code, which is then dutifully incorporated into VSCodium, with the exception of telemetry code.
VSCodium has never promoted itself as anything more than a compilation of VSCode's base with telemetry disabled and proprietary components, naturally, not included. It has never promised anything else than that. Of course the changes are "dutifully incorporated" into Codium. It's not a point of that project to be different. Your first remark made it seem like Microsoft has somehow infiltrated the VSCodium project and changed what it does.