Atom is Dead! Long Live Atom!
Yesterday, Microsoft announced it’s acquiring GitHub. *Cue Wilhelm Scream* While I wasn’t around for the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” Era of Microsoft, I can say that I’m not a fan of how paid products (e.g. Windows) are treated as an advertising platform. I’m not worried about Open Source in general, as repositories can easily be pushed to GitLab, BitBucket, or any number of GitHub-esque services. What I am worried about though, is my faux-IDE and GitHub-owned text editor, Atom. Among the many contenders in the great text editor wars, such as Vim, Emacs, and Sublime, is Visual Studio Code. Built on Electron, VS Code is customizable and extensible through packages, much like Atom, and is owned by Microsoft. Even though parts of Atom are built on top of Microsoft technology, namely the Language Server Protocol, is Microsoft really willing to split engineering resources across two competing products? Maybe, but regardless of the answer, I’m not worried about Atom (as you may have guessed from the title). Atom, remember, is open source. It’s just another repository hosted on GitHub. If things go south, it can be forked and pushed to any of the aforementioned “GitHub-esque” services, and development can continue right along. Without the backing of GitHub, development would most likely slow, but will not grind to a halt.
Of course, that’s a worst-case scenario. As far as they go though, it’s not bad. We could get lucky though, and see Atom development continue right along as usual, maybe with even a bit more wind behind its sails.