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davexunit

> A hackable text editor for the 21st century

I'll fix: A proprietary (unhackable) text editor that only runs on OS X.

I imagine that web developers will drool over this.

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> A proprietary (unhackable) text editor

I developed some packages for HomeSite in the 90s. When HomeSite was integrated into Dreamweaver and development ceased, I realized that I had wasted my time developing HomeSite packages and that I should never again devote my time to extending closed-source software. Emacs has served me well ever since.

And it reports data to Google... http://atom.io/packages/metrics

But in fairness, they've fully listed the data being collected. I'm actually very comfortable with them collecting these metrics (though I'm glad there's a way to turn it off just the same).

- A unique identifier that is generated by computing the SHA-1 of the machine's MAC address. - The screen width and height - The version of Atom being used - The name of each item opened in a pane such as EditorView, SettingsView, and MarkdownPreviewView - The amount of time the current window was open for - The amount of time the current window to took to load - The amount of time the app took to launch

I'm almost comfortable with the choice of metrics, except for:

>> The name of each item opened in a pane such as EditorView, SettingsView, and MarkdownPreviewView <<

Why would they need to know my filenames?

I _think_ they're talking about the actual 'atoms' - that is the editor components. So the data that will be sent to google is 'EditorView is open', not 'EditorView contains these files'.

I might be wrong though.

You're absolutely right. We don't track individual filenames or data.

"If you do not want this information reported, disable this package from the Metrics section of the Settings view (cmd-,)."

Why should I have to opt out of metric gathering in a freaking text editor??

Because they made the program. So it's their decision.

If you want a program that turns this off by default, please feel free to create your own program with this feature disabled.

It's their decision to track their own users by default. It's anyone's decision to criticize them for their decision. That's healthy and much more efficient than for everyone to start creating their own text editors, payment systems, airlines or poultry farms.

I for one am more than fed up with hunting down and keeping up-to-date with settings for tracking "features" in every single piece of software I use.

And it's my decision not to use it. Why would I want a non-free (as in beer and speech) editor which reports data to Google, only works on Mac, and lacks any unique features? I don't understand the hype created on HN about it...

> please feel free to create your own program with this feature disabled.

I could do that very easily, if Atom were FOSS.

FAIL. A text editor with this default is just wrong.

Lots of assumptions here.

Where are you getting this from? I can see all the source at https://github.com/atom. Every repo I checked has the MIT license.

Can you build a fully functional version of Atom just from those repos?

To compare, Apple releases source code for some components, but they definitely don't distribute "/System/Library/Extensions/Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext".

I thought that file was a joke until I checked it and it actually exists. For those (like me) wondering what it does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectur...

Oh my, "DSMOS has arrived" line (and subsequent freeze) is gonna haunt me for years.

The source of the actual editor isn't public.

From IRC: <EvanDotPro> it will be open source, and other platforms, when it's out of beta

From Tom Preston-Warner himself: http://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-atom-closed-source/82/8

> Atom won't be closed source, but it won't be open source either. It will be somewhere inbetween, making it easy for us to charge for Atom while still making the source available under a restrictive license so you can see how everything works. We haven't finalized exactly how this will work yet. We will have full details ready for the official launch.

However one tries to soften that language, that translates to a proprietary license of any standard definition of "proprietary"[0]

[0] It actually sounds rather similar to the old proprietary license that Microsoft used to use (not sure if they still do anymore).

Wow, this is worse than I thought.

If the source code is proprietary but GitHub accepts PRs from users, it means that users will be tricked into doing free work for GitHub and have no copyright claim on their work. From the discussion you linked, it seems that many people are happy about this unfortunate situation.

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