Open Source the Live Share extension on Visual Studio Code

[jbmagination]

It is very disheartening that Live Share is under a restrictive license. LICENSE-CODE is also very misleading :(

I did some digging around myself and know there are things that might not exactly be something you'd want eyes on (e.g. testing, and internal work/domains). That's okay.

Considering that Visual Studio Code itself is based on "Visual Studio Code - Open Source", then afterwards receives Microsoft telemetry / branding / relicensing post-build (source), and the extension gallery requires use of an official Microsoft-created Visual Studio Code install (it seems), I see no reason for Live Share to not work similarly, if needed at all.

And for that internal stuff/testing, my mind immediately goes to Live Share Audio. Perhaps it could be split up.

I really, really would love to contribute and would love to see this extension flourish, but I believe the restrictive license Live Share is currently under only causes harm. There are great developers who are involved in both making Code OSS and countless extensions.

From the amount of people who I've seen who have taken the time to give this repository a star, many of them I'm sure would be willing to help out and not only suggest something new, but help the backlog of feature requests, and make new plugins for Live Share.

The earliest issue I've found of this was from 2018, with plans for it in the future (see #534). There was another issue in 2019 (#2953), just saying "not yet".

It's now been three to four years with no major word since then. Whatever they are, there are so many great possibilities that could happen from a switch to an open source license like MIT. Please make those plans a higher priority.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue is stale because it has been open 30 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 5 days.

[jbmagination]

Please do not close this. It disappoints me that this has gotten no response.

[jbmagination]

@fubaduba Hi! Sorry for the ping, but it's been about two weeks and this unfortunately has not received a response. I'm not sure who I should ping, but you've been the most recently active.

Thank you!

[ivan-avalos]

It would be amazing if this extension were to become free-software, under the same license as VS Code OSS.

@coodoo Hey! Thanks for reaching out. While Live Share is still in preview, the source is highly volatile 😄Because of this, we're not quite ready to accept contributions or support the APIs that folks might begin to depend on, and so we haven't open-sourced yet. For now, we're trying to focus on addressing all of the great feedback we've been getting during the preview, and make sure that we're nailing the collaboration experiences that we set out to.

We'll definitely share plans openly moving forward, so stay tuned, and let us know if you have any other questions. Thanks!

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share/issues/534#issuecomment-397009693

@lostintangent Doesn't seem like it's in preview anymore. Your comment was from 2018: enough time for the code to become stable. You've had nearly three years to get ready to accept contributions. It's time to release the source code! Please take this feedback as “great feedback”. No excuses allowed.

Thanks for listening! 😊 Have a nice day!

[dnorman]

Indeed, it would be amazing for Live Share to be open-sourced. This would in my estimation seem to be in the best interests of Microsoft, as it will help facilitate a vibrant and inclusive collaborative coding ecosystem.

You can do it!

[jbmagination]

@Davsterl Hello! Sorry to ping you, but this is at the very bottom of the first page of issues as I'm writing this sentence. It's very unfortunate that there has been no official word yet :(

You've been the most recently active, which is why I'm pinging you specifically. If you can direct this to the appropriate person and/or team, that'd be great.

Thank you!

[fubaduba]

Hey @jbmagination my sincere apologies for the delayed response. In all honesty, your issue prompted a couple of weeks of discussions internally for us on how we want to tackle open sourcing and where we see it going. Unfortunately I don’t have all the answers today. However, there are things I can say. What we do know is that we want to revisit the idea of what open sourcing would mean for Live Share and it’s architecture, development pattern and community engagement. It would require a level of product polish we hope to achieve and then think about it strategically from there. While this may not sound super committal, what I can say is, that it actually is a super important thought in our head and we will be putting it in our six months horizon to strongly consider. Thank you again for your patience. I will leave this issue open for updates and tracking. Filisha Shah, PM Live Share.

[markojak]

Any progress on this? We've been waiting for a while to contribute to this and if it's not made in such a way where we can we'll have to build our own...

[jbmagination]

@markojak They said it'd be in their six months horizon; it's been three. I think it'd be expected that whenever they've finished thinking about it, they'd let us know (that assumption comes from where they said this issue would be left open for "updates and tracking") 👍

[jbmagination]

Hi there! It's almost been six months (assuming that six months is January to June, we're a few weeks away), so I'm making this comment now so when the time comes the team is aware there's still interest from at least one person. You said you'd consider it; if you're willing to share the decision the team came to once the decision is made, I'd be interested in hearing it!

[markojak]

+1 On here - I'd like @fubaduba to follow up on this as well please - Let's put some action behind the words.

[d-Pixie]

It would be amazing if Microsoft could actually push a well-thought-out, open-source protocol for this. My hope for teletype dies yesterday when the news of Atom's inevitable demise was announced (it was my main fear when MS bought Github).

In a world increasingly relying on remote work, the experience of live share is unrivaled for remote pair programming. Getting this protocol implemented in more tools would allow for the same level of collaboration for so many more developers. My preference is Sublimetext (now that Atom is dying) - but since the remote pair programming experience, there is ... lacking, I often have to switch to VS code just for those sessions.

Please consider putting some effort into publishing a standard for this - as well as an open-source implementation in a C-compatible library to speed up adoption in other editors 🙂

[steveruizok]

I'd love to see this as well, even if it was in a "PRs not welcome" state.

[jrmoreno1]

@fubaduba : any update?

[markojak]

@d-Pixie Why do you think something like Rep.lit won't work for remote pair programming? It has multiplayer built in by default.

+1 +1 +1 on the Open Source question. I don't think they're going to do it though, it's been 4 years..

I think I'm going to build my own open source version - Anyone else want to help ?

[denysvitali]

@fubaduba, any news?

Your last comment was from almost 1 year ago, and I guess I'm not the only one interested in knowing what's in the plans :)

[markojak]

I think their lack of reply means that this is dead in the water. I don't see MS Opensourcing this

[fubaduba]

Hi All! Thank you for your patience on this issue. We are unfortunately not going to be able to provide any better of an update on whether we have plans to open-source Live Share in the future. What I can say is that given our current feature and bug priorities we're unlikely to do this in the next 6 months. Having said this, we are working to move collaboration more natively into Visual Studio Code and this maybe something we address as we explore that area.

[runephilosof-abtion]

It would require a level of product polish

Why would open sourcing require a better level of product polish? If you open source, you could write a wish list, and get help from the community to polish your documentation etc.

[markojak]

I think everyone should realize that this won't ever happen and we should close this issue.

[mptorz]

It would require a level of product polish we hope to achieve and then think about it strategically from there.

No it would not. All the community is asking you to do is to share the code and provide an open source license. There is literally no other expectations towards you.

[ninjadev64]

@fubaduba I would also appreciate the open-sourcing of this technology.

Visual Studio Code itself is open source and if thi was open-sourced, it would be usable on OpenVSX-based platforms, notably VSCodium and code-server (the latter of which I use daily).

The community is not asking for any kind of code polish - on the contrary, they want to polish it themselves.

There are no open source alternatives and you could be the first to provide one.

[ivan-avalos]

Visual Studio Code itself is open source and if thi was open-sourced, it would be usable on OpenVSX-based platforms, notably VSCodium and code-server (the latter of which I use daily).

And there you have it. That's precisely the reason why they won't open source this extension anytime soon.

[ninjadev64]

And there you have it. That's precisely the reason why they won't open source this extension anytime soon.

Well, no one is asking them to host the service for other Code-based products, only to make the source available.

[ivan-avalos]

Well, no one is asking them to host the service for other Code-based products, only to make the source available.

What I mean is that it's in Microsoft's best interest to make sure that key extensions like this are not available in other editors, in order to give Microsoft's official binaries a competitive advantage over forks. Forks were never the reason behind Microsoft's decision to open-source VSCode. The sole reason was to have a huge community of unpaid developers working to improve Microsoft's product so as to secure its market leadership position.

If you want software that isn't only open-source, but also libre/open-hearted, then you're looking in the wrong place.

[spoenemann]

There's an open source alternative now.

https://www.open-collab.tools

It's in a very early stage, but contributions are 100% welcome.