Inquiry Regarding Commercial Use of VS Code

Question

Dear VS Code Team,

It’s a pleasure to meet you via email. My name is William Chiang, and I am a Product Manager at Altos Computing Inc., a server and workstation manufacturer based in Taiwan.

We are considering including VS Code by storing its image file on a USB drive that will be bundled with our servers (the USBs will not be sold separately). We would like to know whether such commercial use requires any conditions or license fees.

We would greatly appreciate your guidance on this matter and look forward to your reply.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be an option. License terms are pretty clear about it - as per https://code.visualstudio.com/license

1. SCOPE OF LICENSE. This license applies to the Visual Studio Code product. Source code for Visual Studio Code is available at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode under the MIT license agreement. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You may not
   • reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the software except and solely to the extent required by third party licensing terms governing use of certain open source components that may be included in the software;
   • remove, minimize, block or modify any notices of Microsoft or its suppliers in the software;
   • use the software in any way that is against the law;
   • share, publish, rent or lease the software, or provide the software as a stand-alone offering for others to use.

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hth

Marcin

Answer 2

Hello William, 

You cannot redistribute the official Visual Studio Code product with your servers. While VS Code is free for commercial development use, Microsoft's license prohibits bundling or redistributing the official installer. 

However, Visual Studio Code's source code is available under the MIT License, which permits commercial redistribution. This approach requires building the application from source code, removing all Microsoft branding, trademarks, and telemetry, and using different product names and visual identity. 

A simpler option is VSCodium, which provides pre-built versions of VS Code from the MIT-licensed source with Microsoft elements already removed.

I recommend evaluating VSCodium first for your distribution needs. If custom modifications are required, building from source remains an option. Have your legal team review the referenced licenses before proceeding. 

Also, this forum focuses on Visual Studio IDE. Your question concerns Visual Studio Code, a separate product with distinct licensing. For future VS Code inquiries, please use the official GitHub repository discussions. 

I hope this clarifies your question.