Ask HN: Microsoft acquisition goes beyond GitHub (the platform)

2 points by brunjact 8 years ago | 1 comment

…it also affects Atom! (the text editor)

Finding an alternative to GitHub is easy-peasy. An alternative to Atom may not be so easy.

Several years ago Oracle got hold of MySQL and Open Office. Two popular projects. Whilst MySQL kept on going Open Office got the brakes on. The latter was kept alive by the Libre Office fork.

Microsoft will now own two popular text editors, Atom and Visual Studio Code. Will it keep both of them? Will they be merged? Will any of them be discontinued?

VS Code is now freely available for commercial use. (I don't think it was always the case.) With the recent turn of events maybe VS Code will go back (?) to non-free whilst Atom remains free but with less features.

Who knows?

onion2k 8 years ago |

Microsoft will now own two popular text editors, Atom and Visual Studio Code.

Atom is an open collaboration between Facebook and Github. That hasn't changed. Microsoft could insist that Github withdraw from the project, but that's very unlikely. Regardless, Atom isn't going anywhere.