
Why is Atom closed source? - zeckalpha
http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9
======
georgemcbay
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?

~~~
technojunkie
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
"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)

~~~
_RPM
Better than VIM? What do you say that?

~~~
pritambaral
I think he meant useability (by a newbie).

~~~
_RPM
I have yet to find an editor that makes me more productive than VIM.

~~~
nobleach
While I love Vim and agree that it's probably the most extensible editor
available, trying to explain its idiosyncrasies to a new user could take quite
a while. Trying to explain why you can't just grab your mouse, highlight a
line, and cut it and paste it somewhere else in the document would probably
lose a person. "Hey, you're going to want to find the text, go into visual
mode, select it, hit :m38 to move it to line 38... "

------
doesnt_know
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
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...](https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/blob/master/LICENSE.md)

~~~
ef4
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).

------
bayesianhorse
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
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-
an...](http://sagemath.blogspot.ca/2009/12/mathematical-software-and-me-
very.html)

~~~
est
Interesting story of SAGE here. What happened to it? Nowadays it seems that
numpy/scipy has more users and community attention.

~~~
hdevalence
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.

~~~
rz2k
And you can use R and Octave in a worksheet, too, but my understanding is that
the point of SAGE is much closer to a superset of the types of functionalities
that you find in SymPy. That is, that it is meant for symbolic manipulation.

------
wbond
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.

------
bayesianhorse
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
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.

------
adyus
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.

~~~
chrislloyd
Disclosure: I'm a founder.

You may be interested in what we're doing over at Assembly:
[https://assemblymade.com](https://assemblymade.com). Open source products
that share profits between contributors.

~~~
adyus
This does look very interesting. Do you have any stats available, or is
everything too new?

I'm just wondering if a developer could make a decent monthly living by
working 40hrs/week on different projects.

Also, what happens if one of these projects wants to break out and go for VC
money? Is each contributor's stake a legally binding "share" of the app?

Lastly, who owns the idea, in a legal sense? Would Assembly receive all
revenue and distribute it, in which case it's logical that it would receive
all ownership of ideas?

------
dmazin
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
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
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.

------
vezzy-fnord
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.

------
jalan
I expected better from GitHub, disappointed!

~~~
kcbanner
Why did anyone expect this to be open source? I don't understand this entitled
attitude at all.

~~~
bayesianhorse
For one thing because Git is open source, and who would expect a profitable
open source company to attempt to commercialize an html5 text editor?

~~~
vezzy-fnord
GitHub itself is proprietary. Don't confuse the DVCS with the software hosting
service that made it popular.

~~~
bayesianhorse
GitHub is based around open source software. Ruby on Rails, Git, various other
tools in deployments. Working inside open source browsers mostly. Breathing
the open source community on its site.

For me, GitHub is an open source company even if they don't open source all of
their code...

I don't equate git with github, I just don't like bloating my posts with too
much nitpicking.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
A ton of companies are based around open source software. That's kind of the
beauty of it. It has enabled the proliferation of businesses and has sped up
innovation.

But by your logic, the NSA must be an open source government agency. After
all, the Snowden leaks revealed that their technology (including XKeyscore) is
built on open source software.

"Working inside open source browsers mostly."

Every website and web application is open source now? If you can find a way to
arbitrarily lift server-side code from any web application, you'd be hailed as
the next technological messiah.

No, GitHub using open source software does not make their platform open
source. They do give back to an extent, sure. But that's hardly anything to
celebrate by itself.

~~~
bayesianhorse
I did not say their platform is open source. I did say instead that the
character of their main business puts them firmly in the open source space.
Not even counting their own github account with open sourced software they
created...

------
jhaywood
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?

------
rch
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.

------
mgraczyk
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)

------
naringas
So it can never be forked?

~~~
selectodude
The one GitHub project that can't say "fork me on GitHub".

------
Aissen
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
It's nothing like c9.io. Atom is a desktop app and relies on Node's FS
modules...

~~~
Aissen
It is. But my guess is that it will work on both desktop and web. We'll see.

------
gedrap
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.

~~~
ef4
> 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
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
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.

------
dbbolton
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.

------
zeckalpha
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
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
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_De...](https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/breakoutdocs/Singleton_Development_License)

------
benched
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
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-
everyth...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-
everything.html)

~~~
swah
Making it free and open source, with great GitHub support as well, would also
be a good strategy :)

