Remember the Material Theme for VS Code? It is being managed so poorly that the result is indistinguishable from malware, and Mattia Astorino (aka equinusocio) is to blame.

If you’re out of the loop, here’s a quick summary: Mattia was a contributor to Material Theme. He kind of went insane. He started begging for money, and closed sourced Material Theme in order to start selling a premium version. Oh - he also started threatening to sue anyone who re-used the colors or name “Material Theme”.

Material Theme was previously Apache 2 licensed. He deleted the git history and work of many other contributors to hide this fact. I have been maintaining a fork since he started threatening to sue people.

We are still awaiting more details on the malicious code he published. The VS Code team has removed the extension and uninstalled it from all current users IDEs.

Incredibly enough, he blames my YouTube video for all of his problems. His statement on the matter is genuinely insane:

Unfortunately, all our extensions have been censored and pulled down without any possibility of appeal, notice, or apparent reason. A really sad day. The main reason is due to a stupid and ignorant person who shared a fake and defamatory video on YouTube, spreading false and invented information without knowing the real facts. Unfortunately, this cancer has spread and people have reported all extensions “as viruses” regardless, relying on the false information disclosed and repeating it like parrots.

There is a new premium version of the theme and icons but at the moment it cannot be distributed on the marketplace, if we want to do it given the meaningless censorship.

If you want you can install the latest Free versions as vsix:

(link to material-theme-original.zip)

Unzip, and run “Install extension from vsix command”. The extensions are perfectly fine, don’t be fooled by stupid and ignorant people. Unfortunately, our Microsoft account has been blocked/banned too…so we already discontinued all our relations with Microsoft, we don’t know if we want to interact with it anymore.

I will do my best to update this article as more info comes in. I just wanted to make sure that this was known publicly, and that Mattia Astorino (aka equinusocio) does not get to continue with his malicious actions.

Do not hire him. Do not sponsor him. Do not install anything he publishes. Mattia is a danger to all software, and he should be kept far away from the open source world.