Material Theme

If you are a user of the Material theme in VSCode you might have noticed the extension uninstalling itself. It has been removed from the VSCode marketplace and there is more drama surrounding it than you might think possible, considering we’re talking about an editor theme.

The maintainer of a few hex codes for the colours and some lines of TypeScript (that he has trouble maintaining) decided to repeatedly change the license of the theme, from Apache to a self written license that is likely in violation of a few laws. He then started to threaten other projects shipping the material theme. Oh, and some git history rewriting happened, to pretend there were no outside contributions.

Theo has a great video explaining the whole drama and created a fork based on the last Apache licensed code, which is especially nice as more content seems to randomly vanish.

I am not certain why this is escalating on this scale now, as the maintainer seems to have worked towards a lot of this for a long time. I would have expected the larger VSCode and editor community to make some noise about this earlier. Maybe it just escalated a lot more since yesterday.

I do not want to downplay the work that goes into a theme, or the importance a color scheme or theme can have to people and their workflow. Being married to an artist I know how much time and thought can go into a detail I look at and go "ok." - not because I dismiss the work, but because it just seems "right" where I do not notice it. But if one of the key arguments seems to be needing either more money, more contributions or something along those lines we should also be allowed to look at how much work actually goes into it and what is being delivered.

What stood out the most to me is the general behaviour, tone and the way the "creator" (questionable term from what I have read in various discussions) engages with others.

OpenSource maintainer burnout is a thing, we all know that. And sometimes you just short circuit. This is the moment you should step away from the keyboard and not go full Matt. The Internet has a very long memory and no matter if it is a job, a collaboration or buying a product, more and more people do their due diligence before engaging in a business relationship.