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Comment by PascLeRasc | Hacker News Reader

This is sad news. Partially because I don't care for Microsoft, but mostly because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities. I hope they don't discontinue Atom or apply their UX styling to the site/desktop app. Like Spotify, I felt safer that a company was just doing hosting in their domain (of music or code projects) and wouldn't try to shovel some other tech into it like Apple making Apple Music terrible on Windows. It's good to have more tech companies just doing their single thing well.

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> I hope they don't discontinue Atom

Hadn't crossed my mind that they might drop Atom for VS Code before...

I thought VS Code was Atom? (well, a fork of)

It’s not. They are both web-based but otherwise unrelated.

No, not at all. The only common component (I think) is Electron (Atom shell).

VSCode is built on top of the same framework as Atom, Electron, which was previously called Atom-shell.

It's worth noting that the core contributors to Electron are Github employees.

That gives the acquisition a very different perspective.

What if MS is really buying Electron? It’s something they’ve been using a lot in all their recent products, and it’s a key technology in the contemporary development landscape. Making it more Windows-friendly would definitely help them.

Improving Electron can be done far cheaper and easier than acquiring a company.

The only thing GitHub has that Microsoft can't easily get on their own is the user base. That's what this acquisition will be about.

But controlling a leading platform so completely isn't cheap.

They can also ensure the next electronconf isn't cancelled. Everyone wins!

No, it's not a fork. They both run on Electron, so they share a common runtime environment, but they share no editor code.

Wasn't Electron created for Atom? If so, VSCode is at least using a part of Atom.

I mean, by that argument Windows uses Unix because C was written for Unix.

At least historically Windows used different parts of UNIX. i.e. they used BSD's TCP/IP stack for quite some time. Also used "UNIX services for Windows" and recently added the Windows subsystem for Linux.

That doesn't make Electron _a part_ of Atom. If I build my application on top of Linux, my application is not _a part_ of Linux.

Electron is its own application framework, that Atom builds itself on top of. Electron is not a text editor framework, no more than QT or Cocoa is.

It is _very_ fair to say VSCode is using Electron - heavily, in fact! But saying VSCode is using part of Atom is just not true, and implies VSCode is building atop the Atom editor, which it does not.

Well, answering myself... Looks like it uses the Electron Shell project which was part of Atom

https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/04/30/microsofts-cross-plat...

Atom is open source though. One company can not decide to kill it.

https://github.com/atom/atom

Someone has to maintain it.

In my experience, open source projects that are primarily backed by companies fail to create a real community of developers. Therefore when the company dies, development stalls.

RethinkDB was something that I though would still go strong without the backing. I never used it and was never involved, so I'd love to hear what happened when the company died.

(One exemption is Xfree86 though, which was forked successfully by to community to Xorg if I recall correctly)

That's true, and I want to add that usually it's the company's fault for not guiding the project into the hands of the community (be it intentionally or because of incompetence). Rust is a great example of a "company's project" that reached (or is reaching) a nice spot in autonomy.

I agree but I think Github and Atom are special cases.

A light IDE is not rocket science and this project is known (and loved) by many open source developers.

It's not going very well for RethinkDB, sadly: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6659

Sure they can't "kill" it, but a huge fraction of the work on Atom comes from full-time people employed by GitHub. They can handicap it to the point that VSCode becomes the better editor.

I think it already is tbh.

I think the popular opinion (and my own) is that VS Code has been the better editor for a long time now. Performance, features, and reliability have all been drastically better, its one weak spot might be the slightly more limited interface for extensions.

Atom is really just a testbed for electron, where the real technology lies. If you can make an editor that programmers love using electron you can make pretty much anything else (excluding games).

Why not games?

https://electronjs.org/apps?category=games

HTML5 and Canvas do work on Electron after all. :) I feel there was some post on HN about a game released under Electron to which the reaction was "I didn't know it was made with Electron!" not a month ago.

Edit:

Also Atom wasn't a testbed for Electron. Electron WAS MADE for Atom afaik. They only opened up Electron after Atom was out for a while, it'd be the other way around if what you're saying is the case. I think Microsoft is already heavily invested in Electron. If anything they will provide even more resources towards Electron itself.

sad. Atom has much better usable UI. I get constantly lost in VSCode menu and (strange enough) it is very difficult to startup a browser in it.

They could probably also merge the two somehow. The one thing I like more about Atom (even though I don't use it anymore) is editing the editor settings gives you a UI instead of just a JSON file which I don't mind, but it's kind of uneeded to me to have to work harder just to check all my editor settings.

> I hope they don't discontinue Atom

Atom is MIT licensed, GitHub can't "discontinue" Atom so much as stop paying their engineers to contribute to the project. After that it's whether there's enough impetus outside the company to continue the work (I suspect there probably is, Facebook are heavily invested in Atom).

How many build from source as opposed to downloading binaries from atom.io?

Someone can just make `libreatom` and start distributing binaries. The MIT license is nice like that.

If it’s any consolation, Apple Music is terrible on iOS and MacOS as well.

True, but Windows users would find it odd if an app didn't suck. It has to match the overall Windows experience.

Note: I'm working on making Chef code work for Windows deployments of an application that runs under Node. I have strong opinions on Windows right now.

What. Windows apps are far from sucking. There is still no OSS match for Windows Explorer.

OS X and every major Linux DE have tabbed file explorers, Windows still doesn't. I've never even heard of a third-party file explorer for any OS.

Never missed them.

Total Commander for example.

I find the file exporers on linux a huge joke, and Finder on OSX is too simple for me.

On Windows I have found XYplorer [1] to be extremly powerful. Its not OSS and its not free, but I happily paid for it once I discovered it. The project is like 20 years old. I have looked for a free replacement for years and always ignored it, which was a mistake.

XYplorer is very well maintained, 0% CPU cost, 1% RAM cost, highly-configurable, has very nice features. Someone really put some thoughts into the UI and UX. I really like the Ghost filter. Ctrl+P is great. Oh and it remembers all opened tree views after restart, so your workspace is exactly the same after a reboot.

[1] https://www.xyplorer.com/

Some people missed your sarcasm.

Now, on a more serious note, I think the way IE3's News and Mail Explorer extension dealt with custom views for filesystems was nothing short of brilliant. I wish we had something like that for Gnome now.

The "Windows sucks" meme (if you can call it that) is outdated for like 15 years.

I'm sure they'll try to 'Microsoft' it. They could never keep their hands off any UI in any product, no matter if it works or not, and especially lately, leaving a rather spectacular trail of destruction in their wake.

LinkedIn still feels like it's old self to me. Not that that really matters one way another to me.

Just after acquisition, Linkedin started systematically shutting down available API resources, and removing CRM support. Microsoft reigns in eventually. source:https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/linkedin-state-of-crm-2014/

redacted: i mistook the acquisition date

MSFT announced the acquisition of LNKD in June 2016. Your article is from March 2014.

That link says March 2014. LinkedIn was a public independent company for all of 2014.

"because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities"...what are you talking about? They are a company with a purpose to make money. And when I think about some of the other possible buyers, I am fine with Microsoft.

The GP means they were neutral with respect to the tech giants' ecosystems. They didn't favor Amazon or Microsoft or Google's tech. Consider that Apple, Google, and Microsoft all had GitHub organizations and hosted code there. That's what they're talking about

yeah, I'm curious if those other big companies will now move their repos off of GitHub because of this. I guess these two will be the ones to watch: https://github.com/google https://github.com/apple

GitHub has had more ethics fails in the past few years than MS.

Care to elaborate?

I remember reading that they employ some muppet to check that nobody uses "hate language" and their naive "check all words in text files against this list" spotted the word "retard" as in "fire retardant" and locked the project. Appealing for common sense, or even escalating the problem to someone with a functional grasp of English didn't succeed.

You don't remember when the co-founder had to step down over harassment issues? This was all over HN a few years ago. A female developer claimed she sexually harassed and discriminated against and the company then conspired to push her with the founders' wife (not an employee) leading the charge. That guy is a billionaire now.

https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom-pw/

https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/an-executive-depar...

We'll eventually see what happened to Skype happen to GitHub. Not sure how it will manifest itself, but the bloat will find its way in somehow.

Were it a consumer product I'd agree. But this is a developer tool and MS have been doing fairly well in that regard the last few years with azure and vscode.

Not happy as others have stated of pretty much the largest neutral party in development being absorbed.

I dunno, as an Azure user, they've launched good products like Azure Insights, that were really good, which they deprecated or merged with PowerBI etc... that totally tanked them.

So I'm not super hopeful.

It sucks. We had as you said a neutral site everyone used. Now the big guys will move their code. Hopefully we will get a new common GitHub that is neutral and they will use. Sounds like it might be gitlab.

Just wish MS could have left alone. They just do not help move things forward. Now wasted cycles have to be spent to deal with this thanks to MS.

Do you think Gitlab will stay independent? They’re burning money. They’ll in all likelihood be acquired in the coming decade as well.

Or do you think GitHub didn’t want this? Microsoft didn’t force anyone here. GitHub received hundreds of millions in funding. They couldn’t just stay put as a money losing entity.

Hopefully. The problem is the site has to be neutral. Might end up we just have the big tech companies like Google host their own which sucks but you can't blame them.

Right now looks like GitLab will just become the new GitHub.

We were just so lucky we had basically a single site with GitHub and now that will not be true any longer. We really did not have a single site for very long.

Really just wish this news was not true. But I am sure MS just could not resist.

What bothers me is I really like how the newer tech companies are all about moving the entire industry forward while helping themselves.

So Google shared Map/Reduce, K8s, TF and open source just about everything. They spend tons of money finding all the vulnerabilities and then tell their competitors when they have a problem and even help mitigate. They do it all for free and expect nothing from the companies. What Google did for Cloudflare for example with Cloudbleed is how I love it being.

I am old and remember the old days. But as MS has become less relevant those old ways have been dying.

But then it is like MS sticking in their head in the fun of the new way and mess it up. They should just do their own thing and leave the new culture alone.

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