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“Sunsetting” an open source project seems… unfitting? Hand it off to the community, look for new maintainers, donate it to the Apache Retirement Home for Vetera

“Sunsetting” an open source project seems… unfitting? Hand it off to the community, look for new maintainers, donate it to the Apache Retirement Home for Veteran Projects, sure. But saying that you’ve decided to “sunset” or “archive” it, telling users to plan for their migration, seems counter to the notion that open source software forms part of a commons - something that Github, of all companies, should understand.

civilized 4y ago
GitHub is owned by Microsoft, the company that invented "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".
- red_phone 4y ago
  I’m not sure the term has ever been applied to Microsoft’s own products…
  - dkarl 4y ago
    They embrace, extend, and extinguish products they don't make money on, so that people are forced to use products that they do make money on.
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. Atom was retired due to a lack of activity with the project. I've never even seen anyone use Atom, since the time it was released 8 years ago.
      - wiseowise 4y ago
        > Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. They harvest an astonishing amount of data from it.
      - dkarl 4y ago
        Hence the parent comment: > We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro". I don't think it would serve their interests, so I'm not worried about it, but who knows? This cynicism is directed towards Microsoft because they've earned it.
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        Had two coworkers at my last job use it when they needed to edit some of our legacy PHP stuff (we were mostly a .NET shop) but even they switched to VS Code eventually because the writing was on the wall for support.
  - civilized 4y ago
    Atom was developed before the acquisition. Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like.
    - rob74 4y ago
      Well yeah, if you have two very similar products (editors/IDEs based on web technology), one of them much more successful than the other, putting a lot of effort into the less-used product sounds a bit hard to justify...
    - babypuncher 4y ago
      Does Microsoft not "like" Atom, or has its market share dwindled to the point that it is no longer worth maintaining?
      - jonwest 4y ago
        Probably a bit of both if I was to hazard a guess. MS has VS Code, which is definitely the elephant in the room as far as go to IDEs in the environments I’ve been in lately. So right now they’re spending engineering time on both VS Code and Atom, so they may as well focus their resources on the more popular one.
      - vchuravy 4y ago
        If you look at the contribution activity it dropped off after acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft and it seems that development was redirected to VSCode. The writing was on the wall for a long while now, and was one of the reasons why the JuliaCommunity stopped advocating Juno/Atom as a platform and instead switched to VSCode
    - wiseowise 4y ago
      > Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like. Atom is inferior in every aspect to Visual Studio Code. Atom was on life support for too long.
    - 4y ago
  - lijogdfljk 4y ago
    But Atom isn't, is it? It was started prior to Microsoft, to which Microsoft bought Github, and are now "sunsetting". While i don't think Atom was enough competition to actually warrant any real discussion here, the timeline seems quite fitting to EEE no?
- tediousdemise 4y ago
  When this inevitably happens to VSCode, I'm sure we'll all flock to Sublime Text in droves (or some hip new editor on the block). Contingency planning for this could be a small but wise time investment for dependent teams. VSCode could very well go the way of the Do... Docker.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I don't know why Microsoft would do that - VSCode is HUGELY popular and at the forefront of Microsoft "I'm cool now guys!" 'open-source' movement.
  - pineconewarrior 4y ago
    I am sticking to my Intellij products for this very reason. They work great and the motives of the company are straightforward.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      Same, but nvim
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Why would this happen to VsCode? VSCode is a proprietary form of Atom is not? It’s hugely successful Microsoft would never do such a thing.
    - mumblemumble 4y ago
      Sort of? They maintain a trademark on the name Visual Studio Code and some other bits. And it is maintained by a Microsoft team. But the code itself is MIT licensed. You can build it yourself. I have. There are one or two forks of it out there.
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      The codebases of VS Code and Atom are unrelated to each other.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  VS Code Pro already exists. It's called Visual Studio.
  - mumblemumble 4y ago
    Despite the name, they have basically nothing in common. They don't share a user interface, they don't share plugins, they don't share hotkeys. One of the main complaints many of the C# developers on my team have when they have to touch languages that aren't well supported by Visual Studio is that they don't know how to work VSCode.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      They do share some plugins actually, that is why VS nowadays also gets a node instance running on the background. And also why C++ workloads depend on .NET being available.
    - jaywalk 4y ago
      I'm well aware of the differences between the two products, since I use both on a daily basis. My answer was a bit flippant, sure, but they are both IDEs developed by Microsoft and Visual Studio is definitely the "Pro" version of the two.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  "VS Code Pro" came out in 1997
- reaperducer 4y ago
  I'll go Nova before I go VS Code Pro.
- alxlaz 4y ago
  VS Code "Pro" is very 1998. My money is on VS Code 365.
  - onionisafruit 4y ago
    It’s already here. They went with the name GitHub Codespaces.
    - oaiey 4y ago
      That is a very good analogy. Considering that Office was also an offline product before it became a cloud-subscribed web/desktop hybrid.
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  I know that perception of Microsoft will never go away in the open source community, and maybe it shouldn’t, although I’m not convinced Microsoft of 2022 is particularly worse (or particularly better) than most other companies operating simultaneously in open source and proprietary spaces. The context of “embrace, extend and extinguish” has kind of been diffused over the years, though; it never meant “buy a product and kill it,” but rather meant adopting open standards and adding proprietary (not necessarily closed, which is not the same thing) extensions to them that end up becoming de facto standards, so your product is perceived as better at the task then the fully standards-compliant original. What happened with Visual Studio Code and Atom isn’t an example of this at all. For a start, they’re just two products that are competing in the same space; they’ve never had the same extension standards, so the idea of “embracing and extending” just isn’t relevant here. Secondly, Microsoft obviously didn’t buy GitHub to shut Atom down. I’ve seen the arguments that once Microsoft did buy GitHub, Atom was doomed, but Code was already arguably more popular than Atom when Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018: Stack Overflow’s developer survey showed VSCode as far more popular among surveyed users (34.9% to Atom’s 18.9%). If those numbers had been reversed—if Code never made a real dent and Atom kept growing—then I have little doubt Atom would be the one continuing. Lastly, I suspect the runaway popularity of Visual Studio Code is pretty good insurance against a hypothetical “Visual Studio Code Pro” replacing the existing VS Code. This would almost certainly cause a fork (or more than one!) to be created, and it’s highly likely such a fork would get immediate backing and support from one or more technology companies willing to pay for continued open source development. However, I don’t think that’s likely, because I don’t think that’s how Microsoft is interested in monetizing Code. It’s not a source of income in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be. If it just so happens to have great GitHub integration, maybe your company will pay for GitHub enterprise features. If you’re used to using it, you may be more likely to pay for GitHub Codespaces. If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure. And so on.
  - jimnotgym 4y ago
    > If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure This. Microsoft share price depends on the size of their recurring revenue from cloud. They can easily write off a few million on VScode for bringing more users to Azure
- cookiengineer 4y ago
  Note that this will lead to unmaintained Electron Apps until at least 2032. We're basically fucked.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  Like when they sunset the closed-source .net framework and created the open source .net core? Or when they sunset the closed-source PowerShell and created the open-source PowerShell Core? Like those?
jaywalk 4y ago
If the community actually cares enough, they can fork it and continue on with development.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Probably under a new name - I’d expect MS to be in control of the “Atom” trademark and branding, and they would stop further use.
  - chii 4y ago
    if you attempt to sell, or commercially utilize the atom name in a fork of the project, i can see why microsoft would stop you.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      It's just a name, but they should be able to call themselves a 'fork of Atom'.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    I'd expect them to put the project out to Apache pasture (Apasture?).
cedilla 4y ago
I agree in principle, but I find it hard to imagine that there's enough interest to find someone who is willing to maintain the software and the package registry. Speaking of packages - of the six featured packages I get offered on atom.io, only one had a release in the last two years, and half have been unchanged for half a decade. Atom's already dead.
- mauvehaus 4y ago
  A lack of releases could mean dead, but it could also mean finished. As in, complete: not in need of more features, and having no bugs of sufficient severity to bother fixing. Finished is a state more software should aspire to reach. Sadly, with the advent of connectivity in everything, it's getting rare for even firmware to be finished.
  - dingleberry420 4y ago
    Sadly this is not the case for Atom. Many packages are just broken, half baked or missing essential features that their vscode counterparts do have.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Something as complex as a code editor will never be finished. There will always be new languages, new tooling, and better ways to edit. Most real world problems have almost infinite demand for more and better software. The final text editor will be the one that reads the minds of the users and product manager and writes the code for you.
mumblemumble 4y ago
The code isn't being sunsetted, and anyone who wants to take it and keep working on it is free to do so. But winding down the project is still a major event, and I think that it is appropriate to call that sunsetting. The existing project organization will go away. The team will presumably dissolve, with any people being paid to work on it going on to other things. I've seen this happen enough times to know that it is, indeed, an end of sorts. "The community" is almost never large and organized enough to keep a project like this vital. At best, they can only slow its descent into obscurity.
- frostwarrior 4y ago
  I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most projects started by some form of organization end up being dead after handing them off to the community. That is, unless they make their code from the ground up to be as most readable and modular as possible. I remember many projects made by Sun Microsystems that just died when Oracle took over, even if the code is still there.
  - jlkuester7 4y ago
    The history of Zulip is one of my favorite counter-examples to this trend. They have seen great growth and success since spinning off from Dropbox! https://zulip.com/history/ https://zulip.com/history/
    - beachy 4y ago
      Not really a counterexample as zulip started life *outside* dropbox.
    - mumblemumble 4y ago
      I wouldn't really call Zulip a counter-example. It wasn't aband^H^H^H^H^H released to the community, it was spun off as a separate company. They offer paid products, have employees, an office in San Francisco, etc.
      - 4y ago
tinco 4y ago
No it's perfectly reasonable. That open source software forms some part of a commons is not really a thing in practice. Open source software is ran by maintainers, those maintainers own the projects, and they do with the software what they deem fit. And even if it were, VSCode is basically a rewrite of Atom that reuses a big chunk of the original codebase, they're the same sort of project serving the same sort of market, and the community is much better off with only one of them. Instead of letting it slowly bleed out and randomly catching stragglers with outdated marketing materials lingering on the web, they give it a swift death. Atom can go into the history books as an open source project that defined the industry for a decade.
- blackoil 4y ago
  > VSCode is basically a rewrite of Atom that reuses a big chunk of the original codebase It isn't true anymore then saying Slack is rewrite of Atom. While it is using electron, editor and IDE aren't from Atom.
  - tinco 4y ago
    Slack does not aim to build a superset of features of Atom.
    - sk0g 4y ago
      IntelliJ idea also includes most or all features Atom does, but that does not validate this statement: > VSCode is basically a rewrite of Atom that reuses a big chunk of the original codebase They both use Electron as their framework, but that's about where the code similarities end.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Also, the core editor experience of VS Code, the Monaco editor, predated Atom by several years. It was used from the very early days of the Azure Portal and also in IE's Developer Tools. It didn't become "VS Code" until sometime after Electron stabilized out from under Atom, but parts of it have existed for longer than Atom.
travisgriggs 4y ago
I actually prefer what they're doing. Consider most open source projects. Our involvement with them goes something like: 1. I need feature X 2. I find library WeLoveX 3. Is WeLoveX a good investment for my larger product? 4. Ambiguity happens here The ambiguity happens because I have one prominent indicator: release activity. If it's changing lots, does that mean it's active and a solid foundation? Or does it mean it's actually probably not quite ready for prime time yet and hasn't found stability? On the flip, if there's very little release activity, does that mean it's dead, the developers have moved on and maybe there's something better out there? Or does it mean it just does its job really really well and doesn't need a constant stream of tweaks? It's nice to have a general statement of disposition towards the product by the original authors.
dustinmoris 4y ago
> something that Github, of all companies, should understand It’s not GitHub anymore though. It’s Microsoft and Microsoft must advance the Visual Studio brand.
jopsen 4y ago
"sunsetting" is better than corp-speak saying "handing it off to community maintenance" Especially, if there isn't a dedicated community to maintain it. I'll take honesty over corp-speak any day. That said we probably only get honesty, because they want us using vscode instead.
- kodah 4y ago
  Corporate speak involves blatant ambiguity and kafkaesque messaging. "Sunsetting" has a very direct meaning for GitHub, whether it gets supported by the community is something else.
quadrifoliate 4y ago
> Apache Retirement Home for Veteran Projects Honestly, it kind of sucks that at this point you might as well call a project sunset if it has ASF stewardship, and that we seem to practically need the resources of a large company to keep an open source project "truly" afloat. I vastly prefer the honesty in saying "sunset"; it helps bring more light to this situation, and will perhaps drive new approaches to funding foundations like the ASF.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Not everything in ASF is dead. OpenOffice probably is, but NetBeans is still being actively developed. Good thing, too, alongside IntelliJ it was probably the IDE most oriented toward getting people started writing Java code, rather than as a portal into the vast and confusing plugin ecosystem (looking at you, Eclipse).
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    Back in the day it also had decent PHP support (don't know how true that still is).
- gunnarmorling 4y ago
  I think this conflates several concerns which are unrelated. In particular, for a project to be under ASF stewardship does not mean it doesn't have large companies backing it. Look at projects like Kafka, Pulsar, Camel, Arrow, Spark, Flink, Pinot, Superset, Druid, etc. pp., they are all thriving and have strong funding.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  It's only a retirement if no releases happen afterward.
tonymet 4y ago
the code is only one of many artifacts within a project . you have multiple support channels for bugs and features, builds, distribution , monitoring / ops (crash and perf reports), developer apis and a dozen more – each requiring time, attention, people and effort . fork the code and start a new project with resources to take care of those and many other artifacts if you are so inclined . you have the license to do so
thaway2839 4y ago
Most people using Atom or any other open source project, would likely have based their decision at least partly on the organization backing the project, especially in a professional setting. For the most part, when a different organization picks up the development of the project (if one does) it's a completely new project at this point (there are exceptions, such as a backing organization continuing to back the project, but deciding that it's better supported by an independent trust, and therefore building a transition plan for that). The best example of this is looking at any Apache supported project today. There are very few projects that were handed over to the Apache foundation that people would want to continue using in their post Apache handover date, even if they were amongst the lucky few that still have active development (OpenOffice, for example). Sunsetting is absolutely the right term/approach to use.
trasz 4y ago
It's not an open source project - it never was, it's commercial, corporate project releasing code licensed as Open Source.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  "It's not open source, it's code licensed as open source". Hmkay... I find it impressive how concisely you're contradicting yourself in that sentence.
  - trasz 4y ago
    The project is not open source. The code it releases is open source. There's no contradiction - it's perfectly normal for a company to release their code under an open license; Chromium is another example of this. It's technically open, but for almost every practical purpose it could be closed and it would make no difference.
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      What you're trying to say is "I don't like the way it's run". Okay, fine. That doesn't make it "not open source". I have projects where I don't accept patches. "It works for me" and I just don't feel like reviewing patches. Is that not "open source" in spite of being MIT licenced? "I can do with the code what I want" is the entire and only point of Open Source and Free Software, something Stallman and many others have been pretty clear about over the years.
      - trasz 4y ago
        >"I can do with the code what I want" is the entire and only point of Open Source This is not true at all, as evidenced by http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral.... You are mistaking Open Source for public domain.
winwhiz 4y ago
All of the id Software code was release to open source essentially sunsett'ed. That was never a problem.
hatware 4y ago
GitHub has been sh*tting the bed left and right. I audibly laughed when I saw this article. I don't know if it started when MS bought them, but it's when I think the decline became very apparent.
sneak 4y ago
Microsoft has never understood open source. This is why they bought GitHub and npm, and paid Docker to make it work on Windows, and why GitHub and the most important parts of VS Code are proprietary software. They use open source as a marketing buzzword, not as a philosophy, and it shows. I think perhaps TypeScript is the only counterexample.
- oaiey 4y ago
  I think they understand open source (and show it by many projects) but like you said, it is not their core philosophy. They are a proprietary software and cloud vendor super house. They are very successful like that. Open Source is 3-4 level down to their main strategy.
seaman1921 4y ago
just fork it, no one is stopping ;)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jillesvangurp 4y ago
The whole point of github is that anyone can fork the project and continue working on it. The code isn't going away, it's going to get archived. The point of MS/Github announcing that they are sunsetting the project is that they are basically no longer spending time and money on the project. Projects this size have a lot of things that need attention like security fixes, legal stuff, trademarks/branding, etc. Basically, they do the right thing here by giving people some time to deal with this in whatever form they care to do that before pulling the plug. Anyone interested in taking ownership of atom now has six months to get organized; I'm sure if somebody steps up, Github would end up doing the right thing and e.g. support them by e.g. transferring domain names, and other things they control. But somebody would need to step up for that to happen. Apache taking ownership of a project would require that there is some community still there to work on it. They have an incubation process for this kind of thing. But there's also a thing called the attic in Apache where dead projects go after they stop being maintained.

civilized 4y ago

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, the company that invented "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".

red_phone 4y ago
I’m not sure the term has ever been applied to Microsoft’s own products…
- dkarl 4y ago
  They embrace, extend, and extinguish products they don't make money on, so that people are forced to use products that they do make money on.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. Atom was retired due to a lack of activity with the project. I've never even seen anyone use Atom, since the time it was released 8 years ago.
    - wiseowise 4y ago
      > Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. They harvest an astonishing amount of data from it.
    - dkarl 4y ago
      Hence the parent comment: > We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro". I don't think it would serve their interests, so I'm not worried about it, but who knows? This cynicism is directed towards Microsoft because they've earned it.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      Had two coworkers at my last job use it when they needed to edit some of our legacy PHP stuff (we were mostly a .NET shop) but even they switched to VS Code eventually because the writing was on the wall for support.
- civilized 4y ago
  Atom was developed before the acquisition. Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like.
  - rob74 4y ago
    Well yeah, if you have two very similar products (editors/IDEs based on web technology), one of them much more successful than the other, putting a lot of effort into the less-used product sounds a bit hard to justify...
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    Does Microsoft not "like" Atom, or has its market share dwindled to the point that it is no longer worth maintaining?
    - jonwest 4y ago
      Probably a bit of both if I was to hazard a guess. MS has VS Code, which is definitely the elephant in the room as far as go to IDEs in the environments I’ve been in lately. So right now they’re spending engineering time on both VS Code and Atom, so they may as well focus their resources on the more popular one.
    - vchuravy 4y ago
      If you look at the contribution activity it dropped off after acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft and it seems that development was redirected to VSCode. The writing was on the wall for a long while now, and was one of the reasons why the JuliaCommunity stopped advocating Juno/Atom as a platform and instead switched to VSCode
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    > Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like. Atom is inferior in every aspect to Visual Studio Code. Atom was on life support for too long.
  - 4y ago
- lijogdfljk 4y ago
  But Atom isn't, is it? It was started prior to Microsoft, to which Microsoft bought Github, and are now "sunsetting". While i don't think Atom was enough competition to actually warrant any real discussion here, the timeline seems quite fitting to EEE no?
tediousdemise 4y ago
When this inevitably happens to VSCode, I'm sure we'll all flock to Sublime Text in droves (or some hip new editor on the block). Contingency planning for this could be a small but wise time investment for dependent teams. VSCode could very well go the way of the Do... Docker.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I don't know why Microsoft would do that - VSCode is HUGELY popular and at the forefront of Microsoft "I'm cool now guys!" 'open-source' movement.
- pineconewarrior 4y ago
  I am sticking to my Intellij products for this very reason. They work great and the motives of the company are straightforward.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Same, but nvim
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Why would this happen to VsCode? VSCode is a proprietary form of Atom is not? It’s hugely successful Microsoft would never do such a thing.
  - mumblemumble 4y ago
    Sort of? They maintain a trademark on the name Visual Studio Code and some other bits. And it is maintained by a Microsoft team. But the code itself is MIT licensed. You can build it yourself. I have. There are one or two forks of it out there.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    The codebases of VS Code and Atom are unrelated to each other.
jaywalk 4y ago
VS Code Pro already exists. It's called Visual Studio.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  Despite the name, they have basically nothing in common. They don't share a user interface, they don't share plugins, they don't share hotkeys. One of the main complaints many of the C# developers on my team have when they have to touch languages that aren't well supported by Visual Studio is that they don't know how to work VSCode.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    They do share some plugins actually, that is why VS nowadays also gets a node instance running on the background. And also why C++ workloads depend on .NET being available.
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    I'm well aware of the differences between the two products, since I use both on a daily basis. My answer was a bit flippant, sure, but they are both IDEs developed by Microsoft and Visual Studio is definitely the "Pro" version of the two.
babypuncher 4y ago
"VS Code Pro" came out in 1997
reaperducer 4y ago
I'll go Nova before I go VS Code Pro.
alxlaz 4y ago
VS Code "Pro" is very 1998. My money is on VS Code 365.
- onionisafruit 4y ago
  It’s already here. They went with the name GitHub Codespaces.
  - oaiey 4y ago
    That is a very good analogy. Considering that Office was also an offline product before it became a cloud-subscribed web/desktop hybrid.
chipotle_coyote 4y ago
I know that perception of Microsoft will never go away in the open source community, and maybe it shouldn’t, although I’m not convinced Microsoft of 2022 is particularly worse (or particularly better) than most other companies operating simultaneously in open source and proprietary spaces. The context of “embrace, extend and extinguish” has kind of been diffused over the years, though; it never meant “buy a product and kill it,” but rather meant adopting open standards and adding proprietary (not necessarily closed, which is not the same thing) extensions to them that end up becoming de facto standards, so your product is perceived as better at the task then the fully standards-compliant original. What happened with Visual Studio Code and Atom isn’t an example of this at all. For a start, they’re just two products that are competing in the same space; they’ve never had the same extension standards, so the idea of “embracing and extending” just isn’t relevant here. Secondly, Microsoft obviously didn’t buy GitHub to shut Atom down. I’ve seen the arguments that once Microsoft did buy GitHub, Atom was doomed, but Code was already arguably more popular than Atom when Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018: Stack Overflow’s developer survey showed VSCode as far more popular among surveyed users (34.9% to Atom’s 18.9%). If those numbers had been reversed—if Code never made a real dent and Atom kept growing—then I have little doubt Atom would be the one continuing. Lastly, I suspect the runaway popularity of Visual Studio Code is pretty good insurance against a hypothetical “Visual Studio Code Pro” replacing the existing VS Code. This would almost certainly cause a fork (or more than one!) to be created, and it’s highly likely such a fork would get immediate backing and support from one or more technology companies willing to pay for continued open source development. However, I don’t think that’s likely, because I don’t think that’s how Microsoft is interested in monetizing Code. It’s not a source of income in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be. If it just so happens to have great GitHub integration, maybe your company will pay for GitHub enterprise features. If you’re used to using it, you may be more likely to pay for GitHub Codespaces. If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure. And so on.
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  > If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure This. Microsoft share price depends on the size of their recurring revenue from cloud. They can easily write off a few million on VScode for bringing more users to Azure
cookiengineer 4y ago
Note that this will lead to unmaintained Electron Apps until at least 2032. We're basically fucked.
naikrovek 4y ago
Like when they sunset the closed-source .net framework and created the open source .net core? Or when they sunset the closed-source PowerShell and created the open-source PowerShell Core? Like those?

jaywalk 4y ago

If the community actually cares enough, they can fork it and continue on with development.

wrycoder 4y ago
Probably under a new name - I’d expect MS to be in control of the “Atom” trademark and branding, and they would stop further use.
- chii 4y ago
  if you attempt to sell, or commercially utilize the atom name in a fork of the project, i can see why microsoft would stop you.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    It's just a name, but they should be able to call themselves a 'fork of Atom'.
- bitwize 4y ago
  I'd expect them to put the project out to Apache pasture (Apasture?).

cedilla 4y ago

I agree in principle, but I find it hard to imagine that there's enough interest to find someone who is willing to maintain the software and the package registry. Speaking of packages - of the six featured packages I get offered on atom.io, only one had a release in the last two years, and half have been unchanged for half a decade. Atom's already dead.

mauvehaus 4y ago
A lack of releases could mean dead, but it could also mean finished. As in, complete: not in need of more features, and having no bugs of sufficient severity to bother fixing. Finished is a state more software should aspire to reach. Sadly, with the advent of connectivity in everything, it's getting rare for even firmware to be finished.
- dingleberry420 4y ago
  Sadly this is not the case for Atom. Many packages are just broken, half baked or missing essential features that their vscode counterparts do have.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Something as complex as a code editor will never be finished. There will always be new languages, new tooling, and better ways to edit. Most real world problems have almost infinite demand for more and better software. The final text editor will be the one that reads the minds of the users and product manager and writes the code for you.

mumblemumble 4y ago

The code isn't being sunsetted, and anyone who wants to take it and keep working on it is free to do so. But winding down the project is still a major event, and I think that it is appropriate to call that sunsetting. The existing project organization will go away. The team will presumably dissolve, with any people being paid to work on it going on to other things. I've seen this happen enough times to know that it is, indeed, an end of sorts. "The community" is almost never large and organized enough to keep a project like this vital. At best, they can only slow its descent into obscurity.

frostwarrior 4y ago
I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most projects started by some form of organization end up being dead after handing them off to the community. That is, unless they make their code from the ground up to be as most readable and modular as possible. I remember many projects made by Sun Microsystems that just died when Oracle took over, even if the code is still there.
- jlkuester7 4y ago
  The history of Zulip is one of my favorite counter-examples to this trend. They have seen great growth and success since spinning off from Dropbox! https://zulip.com/history/ https://zulip.com/history/
  - beachy 4y ago
    Not really a counterexample as zulip started life *outside* dropbox.
  - mumblemumble 4y ago
    I wouldn't really call Zulip a counter-example. It wasn't aband^H^H^H^H^H released to the community, it was spun off as a separate company. They offer paid products, have employees, an office in San Francisco, etc.
    - 4y ago

tinco 4y ago

No it's perfectly reasonable. That open source software forms some part of a commons is not really a thing in practice. Open source software is ran by maintainers, those maintainers own the projects, and they do with the software what they deem fit. And even if it were, VSCode is basically a rewrite of Atom that reuses a big chunk of the original codebase, they're the same sort of project serving the same sort of market, and the community is much better off with only one of them. Instead of letting it slowly bleed out and randomly catching stragglers with outdated marketing materials lingering on the web, they give it a swift death. Atom can go into the history books as an open source project that defined the industry for a decade.

blackoil 4y ago
> VSCode is basically a rewrite of Atom that reuses a big chunk of the original codebase It isn't true anymore then saying Slack is rewrite of Atom. While it is using electron, editor and IDE aren't from Atom.
- tinco 4y ago
  Slack does not aim to build a superset of features of Atom.
  - sk0g 4y ago
    IntelliJ idea also includes most or all features Atom does, but that does not validate this statement: > VSCode is basically a rewrite of Atom that reuses a big chunk of the original codebase They both use Electron as their framework, but that's about where the code similarities end.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Also, the core editor experience of VS Code, the Monaco editor, predated Atom by several years. It was used from the very early days of the Azure Portal and also in IE's Developer Tools. It didn't become "VS Code" until sometime after Electron stabilized out from under Atom, but parts of it have existed for longer than Atom.

travisgriggs 4y ago

I actually prefer what they're doing. Consider most open source projects. Our involvement with them goes something like: 1. I need feature X 2. I find library WeLoveX 3. Is WeLoveX a good investment for my larger product? 4. Ambiguity happens here The ambiguity happens because I have one prominent indicator: release activity. If it's changing lots, does that mean it's active and a solid foundation? Or does it mean it's actually probably not quite ready for prime time yet and hasn't found stability? On the flip, if there's very little release activity, does that mean it's dead, the developers have moved on and maybe there's something better out there? Or does it mean it just does its job really really well and doesn't need a constant stream of tweaks? It's nice to have a general statement of disposition towards the product by the original authors.

dustinmoris 4y ago

> something that Github, of all companies, should understand It’s not GitHub anymore though. It’s Microsoft and Microsoft must advance the Visual Studio brand.

jopsen 4y ago

"sunsetting" is better than corp-speak saying "handing it off to community maintenance" Especially, if there isn't a dedicated community to maintain it. I'll take honesty over corp-speak any day. That said we probably only get honesty, because they want us using vscode instead.

kodah 4y ago
Corporate speak involves blatant ambiguity and kafkaesque messaging. "Sunsetting" has a very direct meaning for GitHub, whether it gets supported by the community is something else.

quadrifoliate 4y ago

> Apache Retirement Home for Veteran Projects Honestly, it kind of sucks that at this point you might as well call a project sunset if it has ASF stewardship, and that we seem to practically need the resources of a large company to keep an open source project "truly" afloat. I vastly prefer the honesty in saying "sunset"; it helps bring more light to this situation, and will perhaps drive new approaches to funding foundations like the ASF.

bitwize 4y ago
Not everything in ASF is dead. OpenOffice probably is, but NetBeans is still being actively developed. Good thing, too, alongside IntelliJ it was probably the IDE most oriented toward getting people started writing Java code, rather than as a portal into the vast and confusing plugin ecosystem (looking at you, Eclipse).
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  Back in the day it also had decent PHP support (don't know how true that still is).
gunnarmorling 4y ago
I think this conflates several concerns which are unrelated. In particular, for a project to be under ASF stewardship does not mean it doesn't have large companies backing it. Look at projects like Kafka, Pulsar, Camel, Arrow, Spark, Flink, Pinot, Superset, Druid, etc. pp., they are all thriving and have strong funding.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
It's only a retirement if no releases happen afterward.

tonymet 4y ago

the code is only one of many artifacts within a project . you have multiple support channels for bugs and features, builds, distribution , monitoring / ops (crash and perf reports), developer apis and a dozen more – each requiring time, attention, people and effort . fork the code and start a new project with resources to take care of those and many other artifacts if you are so inclined . you have the license to do so

thaway2839 4y ago

Most people using Atom or any other open source project, would likely have based their decision at least partly on the organization backing the project, especially in a professional setting. For the most part, when a different organization picks up the development of the project (if one does) it's a completely new project at this point (there are exceptions, such as a backing organization continuing to back the project, but deciding that it's better supported by an independent trust, and therefore building a transition plan for that). The best example of this is looking at any Apache supported project today. There are very few projects that were handed over to the Apache foundation that people would want to continue using in their post Apache handover date, even if they were amongst the lucky few that still have active development (OpenOffice, for example). Sunsetting is absolutely the right term/approach to use.

trasz 4y ago

It's not an open source project - it never was, it's commercial, corporate project releasing code licensed as Open Source.

Beltalowda 4y ago
"It's not open source, it's code licensed as open source". Hmkay... I find it impressive how concisely you're contradicting yourself in that sentence.
- trasz 4y ago
  The project is not open source. The code it releases is open source. There's no contradiction - it's perfectly normal for a company to release their code under an open license; Chromium is another example of this. It's technically open, but for almost every practical purpose it could be closed and it would make no difference.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    What you're trying to say is "I don't like the way it's run". Okay, fine. That doesn't make it "not open source". I have projects where I don't accept patches. "It works for me" and I just don't feel like reviewing patches. Is that not "open source" in spite of being MIT licenced? "I can do with the code what I want" is the entire and only point of Open Source and Free Software, something Stallman and many others have been pretty clear about over the years.
    - trasz 4y ago
      >"I can do with the code what I want" is the entire and only point of Open Source This is not true at all, as evidenced by http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral.... You are mistaking Open Source for public domain.

winwhiz 4y ago

All of the id Software code was release to open source essentially sunsett'ed. That was never a problem.

hatware 4y ago

GitHub has been sh*tting the bed left and right. I audibly laughed when I saw this article. I don't know if it started when MS bought them, but it's when I think the decline became very apparent.

sneak 4y ago

Microsoft has never understood open source. This is why they bought GitHub and npm, and paid Docker to make it work on Windows, and why GitHub and the most important parts of VS Code are proprietary software. They use open source as a marketing buzzword, not as a philosophy, and it shows. I think perhaps TypeScript is the only counterexample.

oaiey 4y ago
I think they understand open source (and show it by many projects) but like you said, it is not their core philosophy. They are a proprietary software and cloud vendor super house. They are very successful like that. Open Source is 3-4 level down to their main strategy.

seaman1921 4y ago

just fork it, no one is stopping ;)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jillesvangurp 4y ago

The whole point of github is that anyone can fork the project and continue working on it. The code isn't going away, it's going to get archived. The point of MS/Github announcing that they are sunsetting the project is that they are basically no longer spending time and money on the project. Projects this size have a lot of things that need attention like security fixes, legal stuff, trademarks/branding, etc. Basically, they do the right thing here by giving people some time to deal with this in whatever form they care to do that before pulling the plug. Anyone interested in taking ownership of atom now has six months to get organized; I'm sure if somebody steps up, Github would end up doing the right thing and e.g. support them by e.g. transferring domain names, and other things they control. But somebody would need to step up for that to happen. Apache taking ownership of a project would require that there is some community still there to work on it. They have an incubation process for this kind of thing. But there's also a thing called the attic in Apache where dead projects go after they stop being maintained.