Visual Studio Code is Freeware and almost all of it is freely licensed code. But it contains a few parts that enable Microsoft to see how it is used so they can decide decide what to develop next. This is called telemetry and means that your usage of the software will be transmitted in an anonymized form to Servers owned and operated by Microsoft. This part is not open.

If you absolutely don’t want that there is a mostly equivalent really libre (free and opensource) version of the software called VSCodium.

Finding the right file to download here is a bit more complicated:

We suggest you use on Windows VSCodiumSetup-x64-…exe if you own the Computer and VSCodiumUserSetup-x64-…exe if it is an institutional machine like one provided by the university

On Linux there are builds as rpm or deb package for a variety of computer architectures. On any current PC or notebook you will want to get the amd64 or x86_64 variety.

We do not recommend using VSCodium on MacOS as the OS will complain about unsecure unsigned software. There is a reason why Apple decided to warn about software downloaded from somewhere on the internet. You can however find a VSCodium-darwin-x64-…zip file that contains a binary usable on Intel Macs. You can install VSCodium using brew. See the website.

You can use VSCodium and Visual Studio Code almost interchangeably. One exception we can encounter here are special links that open a “repository” in Visual Studio but not in VSCodium. It is just a little bit more work to use VSCodium.

Another difference might be that there are a small number of extensions that are not available for VSCodium by just clicking install. One of them is the TEI Publisher extension which could be a handy addition for anyone creating TEI/XML.