So, yeah. If you somehow haven't heard (seriously though, how could you not have heard), Microsoft bought GitHub the other day. I'm not going to go into much detail on that, but I would recommend having a look @ this post by Massimo Artizzu if you want to know more.
One thing that nobody else seems to be paying much attention to is what will happen to a couple of the tools that many developers probably use daily. To those of us who don't want a full-blown IDE, but want a little more than Notepad, these are awesome tools, customisable yet still light, with a fairly nice UI.
Yep, I'm talking about text editors. Atom and Visual Studio Code are two of the big favourites when it comes to free text editors that are for both Windows and macOS. Most developers prefer one or the other. Obviously, these two aren't necessarily the best editors around, but for most people they do the job.
GitHub made Atom, and it's amazing.
Microsoft made VS Code, and it's incredible.
Microsoft just bought GitHub. Now... it owns both Atom and VS Code?
I'm curious. Are they going to continue to be developed separately, as they are currently, or is some sort of "VS Atom" going to come out? Is Atom going to get integration with MS services built-in? Will nothing happen at all? Have I completely misunderstood the situation and Microsoft has no power over Atom? I have no idea.
What do you think is going to happen to these editors?
EDIT:
Here's a response to this by Lee Dohm, the Open Source Community Manager at GitHub: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/17454/#issuecomment-394421141
Also, just to clear something up. I know Atom is Open Source and is under the MIT License. When I talked about "owning" it, I meant that they created it and it's mainly their team working on it, even though it is open source and I expect the community has contributed sizeable amounts of code to it. Plus - they own the repository itself.
Top comments (15)
I don't think that they'll do anything radical with atom. A lot of people are already negative towards the acquisition of Github, and messing up atom definitely wouldn't help. And I don't see how some sort of merge would benefit VS Code, as it in my opinion is superior in most ways.
Completely agree. Just curious as to what the future will hold. This isn't a major issue, and it's unlikely much will happen (if anything), but I want to see what people think could happen.
Also just the fact that these two "competitors" (although the people working on them would likely not call them that) are now both under the same roof (kinda) is both puzzling and funny to me, I guess.
Both are open source, so the worst thing that could happen would be for Microsoft to discontinue development, at which point the community would take over, if need be.
The best thing that can happen is that both projects are continued and learn from each other to become the two best viable choices for developers.
I'm quite happy with the idea of these two forces merging. We have two electron based text editors, I don't see why they would not put those teams together to produce a much more incredible version.
I think one things for certain though, they're likely to leave whatever text editor they build as open source, and that's a positive thing.
I don't think there's a great deal to worry about with regards to Atom in the short term. It's open source, whoever wants to work on it will keeping working on it.
I also don't imagine MS owned GitHub will torch the project (i.e. close its source, remove it entirely or apply some BS license). Instead, they'll just invest in VSCode, porting over the stuff that makes sense from Atom and continue to build a great editor.
Whether Atom survives in the long term is largely up to the community that supports it. It's unlikely that it's going to be receive direct investment now, so it'll have to find a new way to swim. Or sink.
What's interesting to me is that I see VSCode as the superior editor anyway (it took me a good long time to form that opinion too), so MS purchasing GitHub changes very little about the trajectories of these tools in my mind.
At first I was kinda worried for Atom, but hey, it's open-source and has a solid community, I think it'll be fine.
I am very unsure on whether or not Microsoft would be able to legally change the license on already released versions of Atom. I don't think so, but it would be nice if an IP lawyer could weigh in.
Well, I don't know if they could but I don't think they would, MS is more open source friendly than what meets the eye. And I think they tend to be more open source themselves over the years.
I agree. I don't have any expectation that they would do that. This situation just made me realize that that was a question that I don't know the answer to.
I Imagine it's more about pushing azure, so maybe atom will get some kind of azure integration? BTW you have a typo in visual (virtual) studio code
Thanks, hadn't seen that. Fixed.
I think in the short term they both probably continue but longer term atom probably gets killed off and it's best features (particularly it's github integrations) get added into Code. Which sucks because I actually prefer Atom, but oh well they are both perfectly usable and have the extensions I need.
I wondered too, and my knee-jerk reaction was to disable auto-updates because I don't like change. <-- totally weird response, I know, but I've seen other "open source" projects which relied on single companies just whither completely.
Apparently, GitHub sold off Speaker Deck before the acquisition.... From speakerdeck.com
So... my guess is they have plans to resolve this by discontinuing development on one or the other. I'd guess VSCode will win in this case.
I'm switching to Vim in case Atom dies... Or maybe buy a sublime license.