8 ms·

Why is Atom closed source?

126 points by zeckalpha 13y ago

zeckalpha 13y ago
Interesting to hear. Not sure how this half-open/half-closed source will work. Something like Red Hat? Then what about a CentOS equivalent for Atom?
- codezero 13y ago
  This is a lot more like Android, where the code itself is open but the core services which make it useful are hosted and not open.
  - adrianmalacoda 13y ago
    Nah, Android is the other way around. The core Android platform (the AOSP) is free software, but the Google services are proprietary. This looks like they're going to allow people to view the source code, but not actually use it. My impression is that it would be similar to Assembla's not-really-open-source license [1] [1] https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/breakoutdocs/Singleton_Development_License https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/breakoutdocs/Singleton_De...
- richardfontana 13y ago
  Sounds like providing source code under a proprietary license. That's not Red Hat's model.
jalan 13y ago
I expected better from GitHub, disappointed!
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  GitHub itself isn't open source, nor are its desktop clients, so it is par for the course. On the other hand, if this was from Gitorious...
  - 3825 13y ago
    In an article aptly titled "Open source (almost) everything", GitHub co-founder and current president Tom Preston-Werner writes[0], "Don't open source anything that represents core business value." He specifically mentions two examples of what not to open source: Core GitHub Rails app (easier to sell when closed) The Jobs Sinatra app (specially crafted integration with github.com) Now, I'd find the argument really stretched thin if you were to tell me that a text editor is your core selling point. Where does a text editor fit into GitHub's overarching mission? [0] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...
- primitivesuave 13y ago
  GitHub gives away an incredibly powerful service (hosted version control) for free. While hosting it may not be in itself a considerable expense, personnel and R&D is. They have all the rights to recover their costs in some way. At the end of the day, they are a business.
  - mempko 13y ago
    Making the service free for open source and free software was a strategic business decision. Services like github make money from private repos and a good advertisement for the service is to allow open software to use it for free. Nobody asked them to spend their money creating an editor. It was their decision. They have been profitable for a while now and deciding to make an editor, charging for it, is not recouping costs for their existing service...
    - watty 13y ago
      How do you know what their business plan is? They're a big boy company, they can make decisions based off of their own financial analysis. They decided that charging for this editor was more profitable for them as a company. Expecting something to be open source is like expecting McDonald's to give away cheeseburgers.
      - zeckalpha 13y ago
        McDonald's does give away straws, however.
        stock_toaster 13y ago
        And ketchup.
        eru 13y ago
        In Germany they charge for the ketchup.
- kcbanner 13y ago
  Why did anyone expect this to be open source? I don't understand this entitled attitude at all.
  - alagu 13y ago
    I think it is because of the expectations set by Tom (mojombo). http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth... He mentioned not to opensource anything that represents core business value. A Text Editor is best set to grow when available free. Examples - VIM, Emacs, LightTable. That said, there have been hints that it might be paid ("Atom is free till beta") and Github might try to make money through it like Sublime or Textmate. Though I wouldn't worry much about Opensourcing, I might think twice to pay for a Text Editor - considering that there are really good free alternatives.
    - ajanuary 13y ago
      While I'm sure you'll be proven correct, I think it's a little premature to add LightTable into that list.
  - yarou 13y ago
    How is expecting something to be open source an entitlement? I guess in your world view, it's an entitlement to be free and alive.
    - watty 13y ago
      It's an entitlement because developing something like this requires an absurd amount of time and money. Why should they work for free. Do you work for free? Would you consider your boss entitled if he expected you to work for free? What's my view of OSS? I'm thankful for it. Yes, it's free work - they're working (although doing it for pleasure) and giving it away as a gift. I guess that's the difference, I view it as a gift, others seem to think it's immoral to work for pay. Edit: Please enlighten me, what exactly is immoral about charging for software that takes thousands of man hours to create?
naringas 13y ago
So it can never be forked?
- selectodude 13y ago
  The one GitHub project that can't say "fork me on GitHub".
- captn3m0 13y ago
  As someone mentioned on the atom forum, all public github projects need to be "forkable" as per GitHub's ToS.
adyus 13y ago
The interesting thing is that they would accept pull requests (presumably from the devs they offered that "restricted" access), but might not share the profits from charging for atom.io. Food for thought.
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  Most other commercialized open source products do the same. One could argue that GitHub has done their share for the open source community already, however.
- jevinskie 13y ago
  I find that model interesting. It lets me fix any showstopper bugs (possibly with terrible hacks, at first) right now and potentially get it upstreamed later. That is a lot better than any closed source software!
  - hdevalence 13y ago
    It's much better than closed-source software: they get you to do the work of fixing bugs, but they still keep the money!
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - jevinskie 13y ago
      Last week, I helped a vendor fix a bug in closed source software after reversing binary diffs. I would have definitely welcomed shared source!
- eli 13y ago
  I think either you or I misread that. I assumed "restrictive license" meant anyone could see the source, but the license would prevent you from creating a competing service. Or possible require you to sign over the copyright for any changes.
wbond 13y ago
I think a lot of people were expecting it to be open source. I don't have access yet to try it to see how it compares in terms of speed and feel. That said, this information seems to put it more in the category of a reimplementation of Sublime Text with a different tech stack and a much bigger company backing it.
jhaywood 13y ago
Don't they know that if you want to open source something but don't want any contributors you're supposed to use GPL v3 with a CLA?
bayesianhorse 13y ago
Closed source? Why hack it then? Why waste the effort to learn it or customize it? It's kind of like the new/gnu reality, where the GPL, designed to protect the authors from commercial exploitation, makes this exact exploitation easier than less restrictive OSS licenses... Making money off a text editor is going to be hard. Especially when it is meant to be hackable.
- hdevalence 13y ago
  For an excellent description of another instance of this sort of issue, see [1] about Canonical and Mir. Github seems to have things pretty figured out: they have a closed core that they control, with a veneer of hackability, and a lot of hype. You then get people to work for you for free by having them create plugins that, while open source, are effectively controlled by Github, Inc. The key thing is to make people feel that they're contributing to a community, even though that community doesn't really have ownership of the work. By the time the tension between the community's needs and Github's needs comes out, you've already locked everyone into your ecosystem. Other notable instances of this phenomenon include the MAGMA computer algebra system, and the creation of SAGE (see [2]). [1]: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html [2]: http://sagemath.blogspot.ca/2009/12/mathematical-software-and-me-very.html http://sagemath.blogspot.ca/2009/12/mathematical-software-an...
  - est 13y ago
    Interesting story of SAGE here. What happened to it? Nowadays it seems that numpy/scipy has more users and community attention.
    - hdevalence 13y ago
      SAGE is still going very strong. numpy/scipy have very many more users, but I don't think that they're really comparable: they're aimed at numerical computation for science, while SAGE aims to be a do-everything tool for mathematics. All of scipy/numpy is actually included in SAGE, and you can interoperate between numpy stuff, and, say, exact rational arithmetic, or group theory, etc.
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
Of course they use the term "closed source" instead of "proprietary" because it sounds less scary. Seems like they want to implement one of those Microsoft "shared source" models, which still count as proprietary.
gedrap 13y ago
I am not sure about why so many people are surprised. Although GitHub promotes open source, it's not open source itself. And it's fine. At the end of the day, GitHub is a company. They need money to do the great things it does. While Open Source is great and it's contribution to the world is amazing, we shouldn't forget that it's a small niche thing, if we are talking about % of programmers contributing.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  "They need money." Who doesn't? But it does not immediately follow that a software has to be restrictively licensed. It has to be part of an overall strategy. Most Open Source contributions actually come from companies pursuing a money making strategy. In the case of GitHub very successful even! Equating open source to "not for profit" is just a misunderstanding of both business and open source. One of the main reasons for businesses contributing open source is a solution for the problem of the necessity of in-house development and the un-necessity of an unprofitable/risky in-house software marketing effort with all the overhead that entails.
- ef4 13y ago
  > I am not sure about why so many people are surprised. Because the whole premise of this editor is that it's "hackable". It isn't truly hackable if it isn't truly open source.
  - PFMiningCo 13y ago
    I interpreted "hackable" in this context to mean "personally customizable". Even if it's closed-source, that doesn't preclude an extension/library ecosystem from forming around the core Atom app, does it?
    - ef4 13y ago
      Except we would all be stupid to invest a lot of effort into said ecosystem when Github can pull the rug out from under it at any time, and Github will be the only one monetizing it. Those of us who've been around longer have seen this play out many times. Free software isn't just dogma, it's very practical self-defense.
bayesianhorse 13y ago
For me it just sounds like a stupid move. I might not have all the details, and I might be missing something. But I would expect some lone programmer or small team to try and commercialize a text editor. In some very rare cases a text editor today might be profitable for a very small team, because of people to afraid of VIM (vimps...). I would not have expected a bigger and more modern company like GitHub to try and make money off a text editor. It's like building an inferior mouse trap in a world of open source mouse traps. So how this strategy unfolds will be interesting to watch!
- noahfinch 13y ago
  I feel like a still-bootstrapped GitHub would have made Atom free and open source and used it as another tool to reach more developers, especially new ones. But alas, they raised $100M and are probably feeling pressure to find new revenue streams.
georgemcbay 13y ago
As far as I'm concerned GitHub is free to handle the licensing of their software however they like, but this opens up an interesting thought experiment: We now have at least two companies making significant Chromium-based editors, one is Adobe and the other is GitHub. One of them is developing the core of their editor technology using a fully open-source model (hosted on GitHub, naturally) under a well-understood and widely accepted license, the other isn't (or at least isn't currently planning to). 2 years ago, who among you would have guessed correctly that the one whose editor was open source would be Adobe's?
- manojlds 13y ago
  Github for Mac, and Windows are not open source. These are tools with tight integrations to Github, and still not open sourced. It's not like Atom is a precedent.
- technojunkie 13y ago
  Adobe's Bracket front-end editor is open-source, yes, but does it have any traction? I have yet to hear any front-end developer friends who even bother to use it in any capacity other than testing it occasionally. I tried it a few times and couldn't justify why I'd want to use it over Sublime Text. Historically, it appears that closed source front-end editors like Textmate, Sublime Text and others find more success and usage in the market than open-source front-end editors.
  - akxo 13y ago
    "Historically, it appears that closed source front end editors like Textmate, Sublime Text and others find more success and usage in the market than open-source front end editors" I wouldn't classify Sublime Text as a front-end editor. When I think of front-end editors, I think of Coda, Espresso, and Brackets. Sublime Text is better compared to Notepad++, Notepad 2, Gedit, SciTE, Emacs, and Vim, which are all open source software and extremely popular. If you're going to market your text editor as hackable and as flexible as Vim and Emacs [1], it's not a stretch for the developers interested in your product to assume it's going to be or should be open source software. [1] http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html
dbbolton 13y ago
It sounds like they might be planning to charge for the software, include (limited?) access to the source with purchase, and put a no-derivative-works-or-redistribution clause in the license. Actual FOSS would be nice, but non-free software + source still beats regular closed-source proprietary software.
doesnt_know 13y ago
I guess the target market for Atom is those that already use a closed editor like textmate or sublime. As an emacs user, I would be pretty happy if someone came along, took the super extensibility of emacs (which at first glance atom appears to do) and spun up a sexy, modern, not-lisp-using alternative. The thing is though, my number one priority for a text editor is that it's under a Free Software compatible license. This is simply not a negotiable point for me personally. I honestly find it pretty amusing that despite the fact technology progresses at such a rapid rate, I'm using a text editor that was first developed a decade before I was even born.
- grncdr 13y ago
  Why not Light Table? It's released under a GPL license [0] and seems to very much be going for "super extensibility". Granted, it does use a lisp, but ClojureScript is pretty nice. [0]: https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/blob/master/LICENSE...
  - ef4 13y ago
    I'm an Emacs user and I've evaluated lighttable. I like a lot of what I see, but for now it's lacking some pretty fundamental user interface concepts that are critical in making an editor that's optimized for the long-term user and not just for the newbie. For example, if I need to move my hand over to the mouse to do some common action, that's not ok. If I even have to move my hand over to the arrow keys, that's seriously suspect. I would also never use the native OS file open dialogs for the same reason. It's fine to offer them of course. But anybody who's trying to get fast and proficient will rapidly move beyond them. For this, lighttable offers workspaces & the navigation pane, which is still really primitive compared to ido-mode (poor keyboard navigation, no tab completion of partial names, no ability to jump beyond a single, pre-created workspace).
- protomyth 13y ago
  Textmate 2.0 is open sourced (GPL3) https://github.com/textmate/textmate https://github.com/textmate/textmate
- 13y ago
dmazin 13y ago
I'm a little confused why Atom isn't free. It certainly couldn't be a major revenue stream for GitHub, which has major investment. I thought this was going to be a project to drive usage, like Chrome for Google, but I guess I was wrong.
- unhammer 13y ago
  Or does not freeing Atom mean that Github is not getting enough revenue from hosting? (Eek, are they dying? Should we move our stuff off to other services? =P)
  - bbrks 13y ago
    Git is a distributed VCS though. It wouldn't really matter unless your only copy is on Git and isn't cloned anywhere. (In which case, set up a remote repository on Bitbucket/wherever) If you're relying on GitHub for Issues/Wiki, then fair enough I suppose. Not as easy to get that data somewhere else.
  - semanticist 13y ago
    As I understand it, GitHub make the majority of their money from their on-premises 'Enterprise' product, which is sold with a 'contact us to discuss' price tag. Also they raised a huge sum of money while already being profitable. I wouldn't worry about them vanishing.
benched 13y ago
No matter what they say, no matter what you say, and no matter what reason itself says, it is eminently comedic that GitHub!!! would do a project that isn't plain open source. As to why Atom, I'd bet this was something one or two senior guys just had an itch about, and they sold the project.
- unfunco 13y ago
  Really? The main source of revenue (GitHub.com) isn't open-source either, companies are free to promote open-source whilst being entirely closed and proprietary, GitHub releases almost everything freely, and encourages the same – there's no hypocrisy that I can see. There are some reasons that not everything is open-source here: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...
  - swah 13y ago
    Making it free and open source, with great GitHub support as well, would also be a good strategy :)
rch 13y ago
As I recall, Github was making money from day one, and has been profitable for nearly as long. I'm sure that fact has contributed significantly to the quality of their products thus far. The business model around a desktop application is bound to be different from the web services, and probably isn't even finalized yet. I'm just looking forward to trying it out to see if I like the editor or not. That bar is high enough, given that I'm pretty comfortable with my workflow as it is. To expect that something this new will be polished enough to make me alter my day-to-day process, but do so without any viable business model, seems rather unlikely. A free/open version would be great, but I'll feel better about adopting it if the project is clearly profitable.
Aissen 13y ago
Expected that they need to make money with it. But then, how is it different from cloud9 ? (http://c9.io http://c9.io) I thought they would try to have it open source (as it's non-core to their business) and use it as a trojan horse to sell more private repos. But they could do that with free to use I guess. And it makes sense, then no one is allowed to removed the github-as-a-backend part, and people have to get the paid plans to develop closed-source software.
- vladikoff 13y ago
  It's nothing like c9.io. Atom is a desktop app and relies on Node's FS modules...
  - Aissen 13y ago
    It is. But my guess is that it will work on both desktop and web. We'll see.
mgraczyk 13y ago
This is a little off topic, but I _really_ like the discuss.atom.io forum platform. Snappy, intuitive, clean. There are a few visual subtleties that would make reading large blocks of text difficult, but seem well suited to the short lengths of most comments (text is #333333, lines are spaced extra far apart). Looks like Jeff Atwood is still creating great products. I even felt a nostalgic whiff of his Microsoft infused sense of style (the <code> font-family is "Consolas, Menlo, Monaco, "Lucida Console", "Liberation Mono", "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", "Courier New", monospace, serif", in that order)

126 points by zeckalpha 13y ago

Interesting to hear. Not sure how this half-open/half-closed source will work. Something like Red Hat? Then what about a CentOS equivalent for Atom?

codezero 13y ago
This is a lot more like Android, where the code itself is open but the core services which make it useful are hosted and not open.
- adrianmalacoda 13y ago
  Nah, Android is the other way around. The core Android platform (the AOSP) is free software, but the Google services are proprietary. This looks like they're going to allow people to view the source code, but not actually use it. My impression is that it would be similar to Assembla's not-really-open-source license [1] [1] https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/breakoutdocs/Singleton_Development_License https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/breakoutdocs/Singleton_De...
richardfontana 13y ago
Sounds like providing source code under a proprietary license. That's not Red Hat's model.

jalan 13y ago

I expected better from GitHub, disappointed!

zeckalpha 13y ago
GitHub itself isn't open source, nor are its desktop clients, so it is par for the course. On the other hand, if this was from Gitorious...
- 3825 13y ago
  In an article aptly titled "Open source (almost) everything", GitHub co-founder and current president Tom Preston-Werner writes[0], "Don't open source anything that represents core business value." He specifically mentions two examples of what not to open source: Core GitHub Rails app (easier to sell when closed) The Jobs Sinatra app (specially crafted integration with github.com) Now, I'd find the argument really stretched thin if you were to tell me that a text editor is your core selling point. Where does a text editor fit into GitHub's overarching mission? [0] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...
primitivesuave 13y ago
GitHub gives away an incredibly powerful service (hosted version control) for free. While hosting it may not be in itself a considerable expense, personnel and R&D is. They have all the rights to recover their costs in some way. At the end of the day, they are a business.
- mempko 13y ago
  Making the service free for open source and free software was a strategic business decision. Services like github make money from private repos and a good advertisement for the service is to allow open software to use it for free. Nobody asked them to spend their money creating an editor. It was their decision. They have been profitable for a while now and deciding to make an editor, charging for it, is not recouping costs for their existing service...
  - watty 13y ago
    How do you know what their business plan is? They're a big boy company, they can make decisions based off of their own financial analysis. They decided that charging for this editor was more profitable for them as a company. Expecting something to be open source is like expecting McDonald's to give away cheeseburgers.
    - zeckalpha 13y ago
      McDonald's does give away straws, however.
      - stock_toaster 13y ago
        And ketchup.
        eru 13y ago
        In Germany they charge for the ketchup.
kcbanner 13y ago
Why did anyone expect this to be open source? I don't understand this entitled attitude at all.
- alagu 13y ago
  I think it is because of the expectations set by Tom (mojombo). http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth... He mentioned not to opensource anything that represents core business value. A Text Editor is best set to grow when available free. Examples - VIM, Emacs, LightTable. That said, there have been hints that it might be paid ("Atom is free till beta") and Github might try to make money through it like Sublime or Textmate. Though I wouldn't worry much about Opensourcing, I might think twice to pay for a Text Editor - considering that there are really good free alternatives.
  - ajanuary 13y ago
    While I'm sure you'll be proven correct, I think it's a little premature to add LightTable into that list.
- yarou 13y ago
  How is expecting something to be open source an entitlement? I guess in your world view, it's an entitlement to be free and alive.
  - watty 13y ago
    It's an entitlement because developing something like this requires an absurd amount of time and money. Why should they work for free. Do you work for free? Would you consider your boss entitled if he expected you to work for free? What's my view of OSS? I'm thankful for it. Yes, it's free work - they're working (although doing it for pleasure) and giving it away as a gift. I guess that's the difference, I view it as a gift, others seem to think it's immoral to work for pay. Edit: Please enlighten me, what exactly is immoral about charging for software that takes thousands of man hours to create?

naringas 13y ago

So it can never be forked?

selectodude 13y ago
The one GitHub project that can't say "fork me on GitHub".
captn3m0 13y ago
As someone mentioned on the atom forum, all public github projects need to be "forkable" as per GitHub's ToS.

adyus 13y ago

The interesting thing is that they would accept pull requests (presumably from the devs they offered that "restricted" access), but might not share the profits from charging for atom.io. Food for thought.

zeckalpha 13y ago
Most other commercialized open source products do the same. One could argue that GitHub has done their share for the open source community already, however.
jevinskie 13y ago
I find that model interesting. It lets me fix any showstopper bugs (possibly with terrible hacks, at first) right now and potentially get it upstreamed later. That is a lot better than any closed source software!
- hdevalence 13y ago
  It's much better than closed-source software: they get you to do the work of fixing bugs, but they still keep the money!
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jevinskie 13y ago
    Last week, I helped a vendor fix a bug in closed source software after reversing binary diffs. I would have definitely welcomed shared source!
eli 13y ago
I think either you or I misread that. I assumed "restrictive license" meant anyone could see the source, but the license would prevent you from creating a competing service. Or possible require you to sign over the copyright for any changes.

wbond 13y ago

I think a lot of people were expecting it to be open source. I don't have access yet to try it to see how it compares in terms of speed and feel. That said, this information seems to put it more in the category of a reimplementation of Sublime Text with a different tech stack and a much bigger company backing it.

jhaywood 13y ago

Don't they know that if you want to open source something but don't want any contributors you're supposed to use GPL v3 with a CLA?

bayesianhorse 13y ago

Closed source? Why hack it then? Why waste the effort to learn it or customize it? It's kind of like the new/gnu reality, where the GPL, designed to protect the authors from commercial exploitation, makes this exact exploitation easier than less restrictive OSS licenses... Making money off a text editor is going to be hard. Especially when it is meant to be hackable.

hdevalence 13y ago
For an excellent description of another instance of this sort of issue, see [1] about Canonical and Mir. Github seems to have things pretty figured out: they have a closed core that they control, with a veneer of hackability, and a lot of hype. You then get people to work for you for free by having them create plugins that, while open source, are effectively controlled by Github, Inc. The key thing is to make people feel that they're contributing to a community, even though that community doesn't really have ownership of the work. By the time the tension between the community's needs and Github's needs comes out, you've already locked everyone into your ecosystem. Other notable instances of this phenomenon include the MAGMA computer algebra system, and the creation of SAGE (see [2]). [1]: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html [2]: http://sagemath.blogspot.ca/2009/12/mathematical-software-and-me-very.html http://sagemath.blogspot.ca/2009/12/mathematical-software-an...
- est 13y ago
  Interesting story of SAGE here. What happened to it? Nowadays it seems that numpy/scipy has more users and community attention.
  - hdevalence 13y ago
    SAGE is still going very strong. numpy/scipy have very many more users, but I don't think that they're really comparable: they're aimed at numerical computation for science, while SAGE aims to be a do-everything tool for mathematics. All of scipy/numpy is actually included in SAGE, and you can interoperate between numpy stuff, and, say, exact rational arithmetic, or group theory, etc.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

Of course they use the term "closed source" instead of "proprietary" because it sounds less scary. Seems like they want to implement one of those Microsoft "shared source" models, which still count as proprietary.

gedrap 13y ago

I am not sure about why so many people are surprised. Although GitHub promotes open source, it's not open source itself. And it's fine. At the end of the day, GitHub is a company. They need money to do the great things it does. While Open Source is great and it's contribution to the world is amazing, we shouldn't forget that it's a small niche thing, if we are talking about % of programmers contributing.

bayesianhorse 13y ago
"They need money." Who doesn't? But it does not immediately follow that a software has to be restrictively licensed. It has to be part of an overall strategy. Most Open Source contributions actually come from companies pursuing a money making strategy. In the case of GitHub very successful even! Equating open source to "not for profit" is just a misunderstanding of both business and open source. One of the main reasons for businesses contributing open source is a solution for the problem of the necessity of in-house development and the un-necessity of an unprofitable/risky in-house software marketing effort with all the overhead that entails.
ef4 13y ago
> I am not sure about why so many people are surprised. Because the whole premise of this editor is that it's "hackable". It isn't truly hackable if it isn't truly open source.
- PFMiningCo 13y ago
  I interpreted "hackable" in this context to mean "personally customizable". Even if it's closed-source, that doesn't preclude an extension/library ecosystem from forming around the core Atom app, does it?
  - ef4 13y ago
    Except we would all be stupid to invest a lot of effort into said ecosystem when Github can pull the rug out from under it at any time, and Github will be the only one monetizing it. Those of us who've been around longer have seen this play out many times. Free software isn't just dogma, it's very practical self-defense.

bayesianhorse 13y ago

For me it just sounds like a stupid move. I might not have all the details, and I might be missing something. But I would expect some lone programmer or small team to try and commercialize a text editor. In some very rare cases a text editor today might be profitable for a very small team, because of people to afraid of VIM (vimps...). I would not have expected a bigger and more modern company like GitHub to try and make money off a text editor. It's like building an inferior mouse trap in a world of open source mouse traps. So how this strategy unfolds will be interesting to watch!

noahfinch 13y ago
I feel like a still-bootstrapped GitHub would have made Atom free and open source and used it as another tool to reach more developers, especially new ones. But alas, they raised $100M and are probably feeling pressure to find new revenue streams.

georgemcbay 13y ago

As far as I'm concerned GitHub is free to handle the licensing of their software however they like, but this opens up an interesting thought experiment: We now have at least two companies making significant Chromium-based editors, one is Adobe and the other is GitHub. One of them is developing the core of their editor technology using a fully open-source model (hosted on GitHub, naturally) under a well-understood and widely accepted license, the other isn't (or at least isn't currently planning to). 2 years ago, who among you would have guessed correctly that the one whose editor was open source would be Adobe's?

manojlds 13y ago
Github for Mac, and Windows are not open source. These are tools with tight integrations to Github, and still not open sourced. It's not like Atom is a precedent.
technojunkie 13y ago
Adobe's Bracket front-end editor is open-source, yes, but does it have any traction? I have yet to hear any front-end developer friends who even bother to use it in any capacity other than testing it occasionally. I tried it a few times and couldn't justify why I'd want to use it over Sublime Text. Historically, it appears that closed source front-end editors like Textmate, Sublime Text and others find more success and usage in the market than open-source front-end editors.
- akxo 13y ago
  "Historically, it appears that closed source front end editors like Textmate, Sublime Text and others find more success and usage in the market than open-source front end editors" I wouldn't classify Sublime Text as a front-end editor. When I think of front-end editors, I think of Coda, Espresso, and Brackets. Sublime Text is better compared to Notepad++, Notepad 2, Gedit, SciTE, Emacs, and Vim, which are all open source software and extremely popular. If you're going to market your text editor as hackable and as flexible as Vim and Emacs [1], it's not a stretch for the developers interested in your product to assume it's going to be or should be open source software. [1] http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html http://blog.atom.io/2014/02/26/introducing-atom.html

dbbolton 13y ago

It sounds like they might be planning to charge for the software, include (limited?) access to the source with purchase, and put a no-derivative-works-or-redistribution clause in the license. Actual FOSS would be nice, but non-free software + source still beats regular closed-source proprietary software.

doesnt_know 13y ago

I guess the target market for Atom is those that already use a closed editor like textmate or sublime. As an emacs user, I would be pretty happy if someone came along, took the super extensibility of emacs (which at first glance atom appears to do) and spun up a sexy, modern, not-lisp-using alternative. The thing is though, my number one priority for a text editor is that it's under a Free Software compatible license. This is simply not a negotiable point for me personally. I honestly find it pretty amusing that despite the fact technology progresses at such a rapid rate, I'm using a text editor that was first developed a decade before I was even born.

grncdr 13y ago
Why not Light Table? It's released under a GPL license [0] and seems to very much be going for "super extensibility". Granted, it does use a lisp, but ClojureScript is pretty nice. [0]: https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/blob/master/LICENSE...
- ef4 13y ago
  I'm an Emacs user and I've evaluated lighttable. I like a lot of what I see, but for now it's lacking some pretty fundamental user interface concepts that are critical in making an editor that's optimized for the long-term user and not just for the newbie. For example, if I need to move my hand over to the mouse to do some common action, that's not ok. If I even have to move my hand over to the arrow keys, that's seriously suspect. I would also never use the native OS file open dialogs for the same reason. It's fine to offer them of course. But anybody who's trying to get fast and proficient will rapidly move beyond them. For this, lighttable offers workspaces & the navigation pane, which is still really primitive compared to ido-mode (poor keyboard navigation, no tab completion of partial names, no ability to jump beyond a single, pre-created workspace).
protomyth 13y ago
Textmate 2.0 is open sourced (GPL3) https://github.com/textmate/textmate https://github.com/textmate/textmate
13y ago

dmazin 13y ago

I'm a little confused why Atom isn't free. It certainly couldn't be a major revenue stream for GitHub, which has major investment. I thought this was going to be a project to drive usage, like Chrome for Google, but I guess I was wrong.

unhammer 13y ago
Or does not freeing Atom mean that Github is not getting enough revenue from hosting? (Eek, are they dying? Should we move our stuff off to other services? =P)
- bbrks 13y ago
  Git is a distributed VCS though. It wouldn't really matter unless your only copy is on Git and isn't cloned anywhere. (In which case, set up a remote repository on Bitbucket/wherever) If you're relying on GitHub for Issues/Wiki, then fair enough I suppose. Not as easy to get that data somewhere else.
- semanticist 13y ago
  As I understand it, GitHub make the majority of their money from their on-premises 'Enterprise' product, which is sold with a 'contact us to discuss' price tag. Also they raised a huge sum of money while already being profitable. I wouldn't worry about them vanishing.

benched 13y ago

No matter what they say, no matter what you say, and no matter what reason itself says, it is eminently comedic that GitHub!!! would do a project that isn't plain open source. As to why Atom, I'd bet this was something one or two senior guys just had an itch about, and they sold the project.

unfunco 13y ago
Really? The main source of revenue (GitHub.com) isn't open-source either, companies are free to promote open-source whilst being entirely closed and proprietary, GitHub releases almost everything freely, and encourages the same – there's no hypocrisy that I can see. There are some reasons that not everything is open-source here: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...
- swah 13y ago
  Making it free and open source, with great GitHub support as well, would also be a good strategy :)

rch 13y ago

As I recall, Github was making money from day one, and has been profitable for nearly as long. I'm sure that fact has contributed significantly to the quality of their products thus far. The business model around a desktop application is bound to be different from the web services, and probably isn't even finalized yet. I'm just looking forward to trying it out to see if I like the editor or not. That bar is high enough, given that I'm pretty comfortable with my workflow as it is. To expect that something this new will be polished enough to make me alter my day-to-day process, but do so without any viable business model, seems rather unlikely. A free/open version would be great, but I'll feel better about adopting it if the project is clearly profitable.

Aissen 13y ago

Expected that they need to make money with it. But then, how is it different from cloud9 ? (http://c9.io http://c9.io) I thought they would try to have it open source (as it's non-core to their business) and use it as a trojan horse to sell more private repos. But they could do that with free to use I guess. And it makes sense, then no one is allowed to removed the github-as-a-backend part, and people have to get the paid plans to develop closed-source software.

vladikoff 13y ago
It's nothing like c9.io. Atom is a desktop app and relies on Node's FS modules...
- Aissen 13y ago
  It is. But my guess is that it will work on both desktop and web. We'll see.

mgraczyk 13y ago

This is a little off topic, but I _really_ like the discuss.atom.io forum platform. Snappy, intuitive, clean. There are a few visual subtleties that would make reading large blocks of text difficult, but seem well suited to the short lengths of most comments (text is #333333, lines are spaced extra far apart). Looks like Jeff Atwood is still creating great products. I even felt a nostalgic whiff of his Microsoft infused sense of style (the <code> font-family is "Consolas, Menlo, Monaco, "Lucida Console", "Liberation Mono", "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", "Courier New", monospace, serif", in that order)