Publishing this extension on Open VSX

[TyMick]

Hello!

I took the liberty of submitting this extension to Open VSX's publishing CI (EclipseFdn/publish-extensions#187), since I was wanting to use it in VSCodium. Open VSX is a vendor-neutral open-source registry that can be used by any editor or IDE that supports VS Code extensions, unlike the Visual Studio Marketplace, whose Terms of Use requires that the Marketplace and any extensions it distributes only be used with Microsoft products.

There's nothing you need to do—once the PR is merged, the CI will build and publish the extension the following night at 03:03 UTC.

In the future, though, if you ever want to take over the publishing of your extension to Open VSX, here are the publishing instructions—really all it requires is creating an account, adding an ovsx publish command in addition to your normal vsce publish, and (optionally) claiming the silvenon namespace. And someone would probably have to remove the entry I added to their auto-publishing CI, which I'd be happy to do if you send me a message.

Thanks for making this handy extension!

[TyMick]

Here's the new listing on the Open VSX Registry in case you'd like to take a look: https://open-vsx.org/extension/silvenon/mdx

[silvenon]

What would you use this extension for, other than Microsoft products? Is there any other software that can use it?

[TyMick]

Great question! Visual Studio Code, while built on top of an open source, MIT-licensed codebase, is itself a closed-source, proprietary product, because Microsoft adds things like branding, telemetry/tracking, and a connection to the Visual Studio Marketplace before building their distribution.

My preferred editor, VSCodium, is a community-driven, MIT-licensed binary distribution of the vscode source. I use it because I'd rather not have to worry about trusting Microsoft not to track me even if I disable telemetry in the VS Code settings. I'm sure others use it out of a simple preference for using open-source software.

Eclipse Theia also natively supports VS Code extensions, which is why Eclipse maintains Open VSX.

[silvenon]

Thanks for the explanation. I'll keep this open until I update the publish script.