Why is Atom closed source?

http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/9

by zeckalpha • 12 years ago

126 107 12 years ago

discuss.atom.io

zeckalpha6• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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...

richardfontana• 12 years ago

Sounds like providing source code under a proprietary license. That's not Red Hat's model.

jalan• 12 years ago

I expected better from GitHub, disappointed!

zeckalpha6• 12 years ago

GitHub itself isn't open source, nor are its desktop clients, so it is par for the course. On the other hand, if this was from Gitorious...

3825• 12 years ago

In an article aptly titled "Open source (almost) everything", GitHub co-founder and current president Tom Preston-Werner writes[0], "Don't open source anything that represents core business value."

He specifically mentions two examples of what not to open source:

Core GitHub Rails app (easier to sell when closed)

The Jobs Sinatra app (specially crafted integration with github.com)

Now, I'd find the argument really stretched thin if you were to tell me that a text editor is your core selling point. Where does a text editor fit into GitHub's overarching mission?

[0] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...

primitivesuave2• 12 years ago

GitHub gives away an incredibly powerful service (hosted version control) for free. While hosting it may not be in itself a considerable expense, personnel and R&D is.

They have all the rights to recover their costs in some way. At the end of the day, they are a business.

mempko• 12 years ago

Making the service free for open source and free software was a strategic business decision. Services like github make money from private repos and a good advertisement for the service is to allow open software to use it for free.

Nobody asked them to spend their money creating an editor. It was their decision. They have been profitable for a while now and deciding to make an editor, charging for it, is not recouping costs for their existing service...

kcbanner• 12 years ago

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

yarou• 12 years ago

How is expecting something to be open source an entitlement? I guess in your world view, it's an entitlement to be free and alive.

bayesianhorse7• 12 years ago

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?

alagu• 12 years ago

I think it is because of the expectations set by Tom (mojombo).

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...

He mentioned not to opensource anything that represents core business value. A Text Editor is best set to grow when available free. Examples - VIM, Emacs, LightTable.

That said, there have been hints that it might be paid ("Atom is free till beta") and Github might try to make money through it like Sublime or Textmate.

Though I wouldn't worry much about Opensourcing, I might think twice to pay for a Text Editor - considering that there are really good free alternatives.

ef44• 12 years ago

Because "hackable" is right in their headline. And if it isn't really open source, we don't really have the freedom to truly hack on it.

prasoon22112• 12 years ago

No. This is not the entitled attitude and people definitely do not think that GH absolutely must open source all their products.

The problem begins when you close-source a text editor. For me, this is a deal-breaker. I would not want to invest time and effort in learning a new tool - my primary tool, in fact - that won't stay for more than 5 odd years.

Just take sublime as an example. I've seen so many ST users, right here on HN, drooling over Atom, ready to jump ship. On the other hand, I do not see any Emacs or Vim users saying the same. This is because Emacs and Vim are very powerful editors[1] and there's no point jumping ship to another new and shiny editor that might no longer be there after a few years. Also, I've seen a lot of friction around forums regarding the fact that the author pretty much left ST2 entirely (bug fixes/enhancements) in favour of ST3. Also, the features of a closed source editor might not be well aligned with what the community wants.[2]

[1] I'm not saying that ST isn't powerful - it's okay. But, Vim and Emacs are far more powerful - because you can hack at the source itself and because generally a much larger number of people can contribute to the project (given that not many people are competent enough to actually do that or do not have the time) - [2] and, if you feel the editor/project isn't going in the right direction, you can just create your own fork and if it's good, people will actually migrate to your fork for better usage. And that really is the power of FOSS.

rpdillon3• 12 years ago

Open source isn't about entitlement. It's about making core building blocks of software available to all because everyone shares an interest in those core pieces, and it's cheaper/faster/better to work together on shared code that doesn't contribute to market differentiation than mucking around trying to build an maintain a bunch of secret, closed-source code that everyone is going to need anyway. Open source frees up resources to solve more interesting problems.

Editing text isn't a particularly interesting problem: the best models for it were developed decades ago, and the main innovations since were fonts and color themes. Text editors are a prime candidate for open sourcing, and most good ones are, including huge IDEs like Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ. To say nothing of Emacs, Vi(m), nano, mg, TextMate, LightTable, Brackets, Notepad++, Kate, GEdit and dozens of other sophisticated, open-source text editors.

Expecting GitHub (of all companies) to err on the side of closing up the source for a text editor (of all products) seems strange.

naringas• 12 years ago

So it can never be forked?

selectodude• 12 years ago

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

captn3m0• 12 years ago

As someone mentioned on the atom forum, all public github projects need to be "forkable" as per GitHub's ToS.

adyus2• 12 years ago

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.

zeckalpha6• 12 years ago

Most other commercialized open source products do the same. One could argue that GitHub has done their share for the open source community already, however.

jevinskie2• 12 years ago

I find that model interesting. It lets me fix any showstopper bugs (possibly with terrible hacks, at first) right now and potentially get it upstreamed later. That is a lot better than any closed source software!

hdevalence3• 12 years ago

It's much better than closed-source software: they get you to do the work of fixing bugs, but they still keep the money!

eli2• 12 years ago

I think either you or I misread that. I assumed "restrictive license" meant anyone could see the source, but the license would prevent you from creating a competing service. Or possible require you to sign over the copyright for any changes.

zeckalpha6• 12 years ago

Something like MIT + Non-commercial would be interesting.

chrislloyd• 12 years ago

Disclosure: I'm a founder.

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

Gracana• 12 years ago

That's really cool and seems like an obvious thing to do. I hope you folks can make it work!

adyus2• 12 years ago

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?

wbond• 12 years ago

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.

jhaywood• 12 years ago

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?

bayesianhorse7• 12 years ago

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.

hdevalence3• 12 years ago

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

[2] http://sagemath.blogspot.ca/2009/12/mathematical-software-an...

est• 12 years ago

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

vezzy-fnord3• 12 years ago

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.

gedrap• 12 years ago

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.

bayesianhorse7• 12 years ago

"They need money." Who doesn't? But it does not immediately follow that a software has to be restrictively licensed. It has to be part of an overall strategy. Most Open Source contributions actually come from companies pursuing a money making strategy. In the case of GitHub very successful even!

Equating open source to "not for profit" is just a misunderstanding of both business and open source. One of the main reasons for businesses contributing open source is a solution for the problem of the necessity of in-house development and the un-necessity of an unprofitable/risky in-house software marketing effort with all the overhead that entails.

ef44• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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?

bayesianhorse7• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

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?

manojlds• 12 years ago

Github for Mac, and Windows are not open source. These are tools with tight integrations to Github, and still not open sourced. It's not like Atom is a precedent.

technojunkie3• 12 years ago

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.

akxo2• 12 years ago

"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

zamalek• 12 years ago

Adobe's Bracket front-end editor is open-source, yes, but does it have any traction?

I suspect one of the big detractors from Brackets is that it doesn't [yet] support VIM/other keymaps out of the box (https://trello.com/c/ckAel1Cl/358-118-keyboard-shortcut-prof... ). Additionally it could have set itself apart as a possible thick-client NodeJS debugger, but again not out of the box (http://blog.brackets.io/2013/08/28/theseus-javascript-debugg... ).

While developers are used to installing features they want, Brackets suffers from the fact that there isn't any built-in package manager and therefore these types of optional features are gated behind a Google search (where most of the top results are questions about support, not the answers).

dbbolton• 12 years ago

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.

doesnt_know• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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...

ef44• 12 years ago

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).

protomyth• 12 years ago

Textmate 2.0 is open sourced (GPL3) https://github.com/textmate/textmate

sprash• 12 years ago

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.

Like Textadept (http://foicica.com/textadept/) ?

dmazin• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

semanticist• 12 years ago

As I understand it, GitHub make the majority of their money from their on-premises 'Enterprise' product, which is sold with a 'contact us to discuss' price tag. Also they raised a huge sum of money while already being profitable. I wouldn't worry about them vanishing.

benched• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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...

swah• 12 years ago

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

rch• 12 years ago

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.

Aissen2• 12 years ago

Expected that they need to make money with it. But then, how is it different from cloud9 ? (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• 12 years ago

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

Aissen2• 12 years ago

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

mgraczyk• 12 years ago

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)

Why is Atom closed source?

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