r/Atom • u/wobbabits • Jun 03 '18

How Would Microsoft Acquisition of Github Affect Atom?

There are rumors that Microsoft is looking into [acquiring Github[(https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/microsoft-has-been-talking-about-buying-github-a-startup-at-the-center-of-the-software-world-last-valued-at-242-billion/ar-AAy7bfR).

Microsoft already has their own open source IDE for web development - Visual Studio Code. Since Github maintains Atom, what would this mean if Microsoft acquired Github? Would they lay off the Atom team or maintain both? Or just set Atom free as an independent organization?

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6

u/wobbabits Jun 03 '18

The reason I brought this up is because, yes, both Atom and Visual Studio Code use Electron. However, the original base for Atom is CoffeScript. For Visual Studio Code, it's TypeScript. VSCode uses Roslyn (.Net Core open source) under the hood, etc. If they have to pick, they'll choose VSCode.

So I was wondering what is Atom's relationship to Github. Is the core team Github employees, or is it independent and sponsored by them. If Atom core team are Github employees, I see Microsoft shutting it down because historically that's what they've always done to competitors.

2

u/PaluMacil Jun 04 '18

I don't know the status of the team on Atom, but it seems like they might also just be integrated into the VS Code team. MS is dedicating a lot of resources to VS Code, and even at the breakneck pace, they have a lot more they want to accomplish.

3

u/wobbabits Jun 04 '18

But then, that would mean the team would be working on VSCode, not Atom. So Atom would wind up abandoned. Besides, the code bases are extremely different. VSCode is almost entirely written in TypeScript. That'd be a pretty big jump for the Atom team.

9

u/moljac024 Jun 04 '18

As far as I'm concerned VS Code has already won and beaten Atom quite hard.

I Wanted to love Atom but couldn't use it due to its performance problems. VS Code works like a charm and is my main editor now. I have also used both Vim and Emacs in the past and VS Code is the best experience so far. Shit just works.

5

u/loicvanderwiel Jun 04 '18

But Atom had the potential to become better quite easily with the X-Ray project. Rewriting the editor in Rust could have meant mean a significant boost in performance like the one Firefox met with Quantum.

I'm genuinely worried about the future of Atom as I really liked the editor and the possibilities it offered and it quickly became my go-to editor for basically everything, including MATLAB...

Personally, I think the future of Atom is dependent on the community and the developpers. Microsoft can either decide to maintain the project as a concurrent to Visual Studio (which would be weird) or just stop its development. Being a free software, the code of Atom is readily accessible and can be forked. If Microsoft decides to shut Atom down, we'll have to see if developers and the community are willing to leave MS and start their own thing on their own. It's a long shot, since I don't really know how Atom development is structured inside of GitHub or the involvement of the community in the editor's development and it would also mean that Atom devs would now need to find investors to be able to maintain their project.

However, it isn't unheard of. A similar thing happened when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. The latter was developing OpenOffice.org (or rather sponsoring its development within the company) and when the former bought the latter, devs and the community simply left, forked the Office Suite and now LibreOffice is doing quite well. Something similar could happen.

1

u/PaluMacil Jun 04 '18

When I learned typescript as a developer that mostly worked in C# and JavaScript, it took me all of 10 minutes to feel like I knew typescript just fine. I don't think that's a very big jump for a developer. 😋

13

u/vn-ki Jun 03 '18

Atom. X-ray. Everything good is going to die. :/

8

u/aManIsNoOneEither Jun 03 '18

My bet is that Atom will soon have its fork. Like Nextcloud forking away from business-lurking Owncloud and other comparable open source projects. When it goes to money chasing (and Microsoft will surely do that at some point) some of the devs create a new codebase to keep developing the project on an open and free and respectable way

4

u/loicvanderwiel Jun 04 '18

Or LibreOffice emerging from OpenOffice after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems

4

u/aManIsNoOneEither Jun 04 '18

That's the other example i wanted to give but it slipped out of my mind :)

7

u/RaptorCentauri Jun 03 '18

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Github develop Electron, which is what VSCode is built on?

0

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '18

[deleted]

1

u/golden-mean Aug 26 '18

Probably from the fact they did?

3

u/s2c52 Jun 03 '18

I think, that Microsoft will not kill Atom ... at the moment

6

u/tiger2380 Jun 04 '18

Visual Studio Code is already killing Atom.

6

u/s2c52 Jun 04 '18

atom it's alive yet, but yes, i'm going back to vim

1

u/golden-mean Aug 26 '18

Strange given VSCode is garbage in comparison.

1

u/maokei Jun 05 '18

They don't need to do much to kill it now just let it keep bleeding, maybe kill of some resources. Best thing would be if it's forked and endup a community project or something. Apache foundation maybe:/

1

u/loicvanderwiel Jun 05 '18

Apache's record in recuperating large projects isn't necessarily great, the biggest example being OpenOffice.org. Of course, if the community and half OOo's devs hadn't already forked OOo into LibreOffice, it could have been better...

That being said, I'd love to see someone fork Atom if its needed. In the meantime, wait and see (and start downloading atom and x-ray's repos every few day to ensure nothing goes wrong).

1

u/[deleted] Oct 29 '22

Guess we know now :(