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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.

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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)

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.

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.

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