Google sells advertisements, so they make a free browser that makes the web fast and secure. They improve search to make the web more useful for everyone. They help get third-world countries online. Why? Because when the internet grows, Google grows. They're not working on search "for free".

GitHub might have taken a similar view with Atom: by creating a freely-available, polished, advanced, and easy-to-use programming environment, they might help foster the growth of a whole new generation of hackers that would use GitHub to easily store and share their code, right there, baked into the editor. Universities might pick it up, and it might be featured in coding academy curricula. Student projects might involve writing plugins for it, extending it, and making it their own: often the first task of an artisan is to make and customize his or her tools of the trade. And GitHub would be there, at the center of it all. Rather that some advanced hacker tool shrouded in mystery, GitHub would be built-in to every new coder's first experiences with programming: an iconic brand synonymous with that eye-opening rush of seeing your code work for the first time.

That doesn't appear to be their plan, though.

For me, GitHub is an open source company even if they don't open source all of their code...

I don't equate git with github, I just don't like bloating my posts with too much nitpicking.

OK if he talks about why, since this is a discussion site?

If it wasn't already abundantly clear from my previous comment, that is exactly what I'm doing.

> And if you do not want to invest a couple of hours learning a new tool I doubt you will invest dozens of hours fixing it anyway.

First, my comment was in response to the person claiming that "those not using Atom because it's not FOSS" are having an attitude that they're entitled to the editor being open-source. I was merely trying to point out the reasons why some of us expected a text editor (not any other software but specifically a text editor) to be open-source.

Second. Since you've entirely glossed over what I was trying to say, I'll explain it again (I should use easier English, I suppose).

It is evident to me that you are absolutely oblivious to the philosophy that drives FOSS. For a software to be open-source isn't important for me because I can make changes to it - it's because anyone can make changes to it. Let me put it in easier terms: If there are a large number of people using a software, and, that software happens to be open-source, it will generally lead to the betterment of the software as time goes on. Why? Well, it's because it is not at all imperative for me to change the code - in fact I know I'll pretty much never need to patch, say, Emacs - for the software to become better because I know that there are other people who are doing so - thereby leading to a better piece of code. Examples of this kind of behaviour is spread all over the place. The Linux kernel is a pretty good example. So is git. Now, because an editor is the primary tool of a programmer, you can be sure that a very large number of people are going to use it. If even a fraction of those people contribute to the editor's source, you can be pretty certain that the editor is evolving according to the needs of the community (and not according to the organisation owning the software) since that fraction of the people contributing code will represent pretty evenly the general demands of the community. So, the editor will become better over time, evolve in a way that is representative of the demands of the community and won't die out.

Now, I'm not saying that Atom isn't a good product. Indeed, from the looks of it, it appears to be a very well rounded text editor. But again, it's not open-source and hence, the benefits that I talked of in the last paragraph won't apply to Atom. This means that the project might die out in 4-5 years. Then, there's the fact that Emacs can do much much more than Atom right now and I expect Emacs will be around 20 years from now [1]. These facts lead me to the obvious conclusion that there is no incentive for me to switch to Atom. Had Atom been open-source, then, it being a pretty great editor already, I know that it would have been much more likely that Atom would still be around 10 years from now (Why? See the last paragraph!). Then, I might have made Atom a second (actually third, second is Vim) editor that I'm proficient in. But alas! That is not to be.

Anyway, I truly hope that you understand why it is that I (and many others like me) want the text editor to be open-sourced. It's not because I will make it better - it's because I know that there are others, far more competent than me, who will, and, do so according to the wishes of the community using the software.

[1] Extrapolating from the fact that it has been around for 20 years already.