From Tom Preston-Warner himself: http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/8 http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/8 > Atom won't b

From Tom Preston-Warner himself: http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/8 http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/8 > Atom won't be closed source, but it won't be open source either. It will be somewhere inbetween, making it easy for us to charge for Atom while still making the source available under a restrictive license so you can see how everything works. We haven't finalized exactly how this will work yet. We will have full details ready for the official launch. However one tries to soften that language, that translates to a proprietary license of any standard definition of "proprietary"[0] [0] It actually sounds rather similar to the old proprietary license that Microsoft used to use (not sure if they still do anymore).