VSCodium is a 100% free and open source version of Visual Studio Code, which removes Microsoft's tracking.

The downside is that, by default, Codium does not have access to the standard VSCode extension marketplace.

This is a script that will patch the product.json file of VSCodium to give VSCodium access to the extension marketplace. I wrote this for Fedora, where DNF/RPM will notice when updating Codium that the product.json has been modified and write a new version to product.json.rpmnew. This script will detect when the .rpmnew file exists, and, if it is newer than product.json, will first restore it before patching. Therefore the product.json will always be up to date after running this script.

You will have to run this every time DNF installs a VSCodium update (I have not yet figured out if you can add a hook into DNF to do it automatically...).

#!/usr/bin/env sh

# Patches vscodium's product.json file to enable access to the standard VS Code 
# extension marketplace. Use -R to revert.

declare -a possibilities=(
  '/usr/share/codium/resources/app/product.json'
  '/usr/share/vscodium/resources/app/product.json'
)

productpath=''
for p in "${possibilities[@]}"
do
  if [ -f "$p" ]; then
    productpath=$p
    fi
done

if [[ "$productpath" = "" ]]; then
  echo "Could not find a valid product.json path"
  exit 1
fi

rpmnewpath="$productpath.rpmnew"
echo "Looking for .rpmnew file at $rpmnewpath"
if [ -f "$rpmnewpath" ] ; then
  if [ "$rpmnewpath" -nt "$productpath" ] ; then
    echo ".rpmnew file exists at $rpmnewpath and is newer. Restoring to this first."
    mv "$productpath" "$productpath.old"
    cp "$rpmnewpath" "$productpath"
  else
      echo ".rpmnew file exists but is older than .product.json. Ignoring"
    echo
  fi
fi

if [ "${1}" = "-R" ]; then
  sed -i -e 's/^[[:blank:]]*"serviceUrl":.*/    "serviceUrl": "https:\/\/marketplace.visualstudio.com\/_apis\/public\/gallery",/' \
    -e '/^[[:blank:]]*"cacheUrl/d' \
    -e '/^[[:blank:]]*"serviceUrl/a\    "cacheUrl": "https:\/\/vscode.blob.core.windows.net\/gallery\/index",' \
    -e 's/^[[:blank:]]*"itemUrl":.*/    "itemUrl": "https:\/\/marketplace.visualstudio.com\/items"/' \
    -e '/^[[:blank:]]*"linkProtectionTrustedDomains/d' \
    $productpath
    echo "Reverted"
else
  sed -i -e 's/^[[:blank:]]*"serviceUrl":.*/    "serviceUrl": "https:\/\/open-vsx.org\/vscode\/gallery",/' \
    -e '/^[[:blank:]]*"cacheUrl/d' \
    -e 's/^[[:blank:]]*"itemUrl":.*/    "itemUrl": "https:\/\/open-vsx.org\/vscode\/item"/' \
    -e '/^[[:blank:]]*"linkProtectionTrustedDomains/d' \
    -e '/^[[:blank:]]*"documentationUrl/i\  "linkProtectionTrustedDomains": ["https://open-vsx.org"],' \
    $productpath
    echo "Patched"
fi