Could you do this with VS Code? Technically, of course it's possible but I don't think it'd be easy. Legally, Github or Microsoft would eventually cave to a DMCA. GPL wins the day yet again.

VS Code's remote extensions are proprietary. Some folks created 'VSCodium' which is VSCode minus telemetry. But they are not allowed to use the excellent remote extensions.

I'm not sure about this, I think they are making their Python LSP proprietary too. There was a comment in HN about it a while ago, can't find it. Hope somebody can help.

So yeah GPL wins in this case. The strategy of Microsoft seems to be that they make the core VSCode open, but might make more and more extensions proprietary. Resulting in people getting locked to VSCode. Classic Microsoft.

Replying because can't edit above comment. The closed-source Python LSP in VSCode is named 'Pylance'. HN discussion from 2 months ago [1]. Notice the reply to the top comment > "Our long-term plan is to transition our Microsoft Python Language Server users over to Pylance and eventually deprecate and remove the old language server as a supported option."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719045

So, so far, two very useful extensions cannot be used by forks like VSCodium.

The server is open source, right? It's here: https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release. I don't know what you're referring to. Can you link to information about the proprietary extensions you're referring to?