Publish the extension to Open VSX

[cooperbenson-qz]

Due to Microsoft's licensing restrictions on extensions distributed through the official repository, some tools require the use of Open VSX instead. We're looking into a tool that needs to use Open VSX, and would love to see this extension published there. Here are the docs for how to publish an extension there. Would love to help out however we can!

[muglug]

What Microsoft licensing restrictions are preventing you from using exensions through the official VS Code store?

[fredemmott]

AIUI Forks of VS Code are not able to use it; https://www.gitpod.io/blog/openvscode-server-launch was initially a major reason, though microsoft open-sourced their implementation shortly after (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/commit/822f995357f725216cdee6e05f1f1552ccbbd882)

[cooperbenson-qz]

Exactly. In fact, GitPod is the exact reason we're looking into this. For the short term, we can probably just build a .vsix and host it on a publicly available URL, but long term it would be great if we could get official binaries and updates via Open VSX.

[PranayAgarwal]

Once upon a time we did publish the compiled VSIX as part of the Github release, but that build pipeline got messed up at some point. I can try and add a Github Action to enable that again, which should make this use case a lot smoother at least.

For the full ask, we'll need to get the registry (https://open-vsx.org/) and its publisher agreement looked at and approved. No promises or timeline to share on that from my side.

[cooperbenson-qz]

Yeah if you could add the .vsix as a release artifact that would be amazing!

[PranayAgarwal]

This is now working again! See https://github.com/slackhq/vscode-hack/releases/tag/v2.13.0, which was published automatically.

[filiptronicek]

Hey there everyone, since it seems a lot of users (including a lot of our users using Gitpod) use the extension, I would like to propose that the extension gets automatically published via the special repository Open VSX has setup for publishing third-party extensions, https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions/ - although this should be only considered temporary before Slack can figure the legal side of it out 🙏.

If nobody from Slack has anything against it, I will add it to the repo.

cc @PranayAgarwal @muglug

[PranayAgarwal]

Hey @filiptronicek, I can't say if we will be able to take over ownership of the listing page on https://open-vsx.org/, but I also don't see any problems (legal or otherwise) with this above approach being the permanent one, as long as it meets the terms of the MIT license.

[filiptronicek]

If it wouldn't be possible for Slack to take over ownership, that's no problem as well. We try to have as few extensions as possible on https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions/ (hard to maintain publishing of ~400 extensions), but the fact that .vsix files are published as Release asset here [1] makes it a lot easier for our script to publish it.

I will try to publish the extension now and come back with the results.

[filiptronicek]

Happy to report all went well and pranayagarwal.vscode-hack is published to open-vsx.org 🎉

• https://open-vsx.org/extension/pranayagarwal/vscode-hack
• https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions/commit/450dc341da8f72f27e01a1ead60f01aefd644857

cc @PranayAgarwal @cooperbenson-qz