Why is Atom Closed Source? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Atom Closed Source?

discuss.atom.io

44 pointsMrGando18 comments

GH is shooting its own foot here. The fact this is the first issue discussed before Atom has even been made public makes me think we'll see a lot of backlash. Eventually GH will cave in and release it under proper license, so why upset everyone in the first place? Some of GH's appeal relies in its image as a dev-friendly, "cool" company.

Now, as for Atom, they don't need to worry about forking when its opensourced, as GH's branding and integration with the present GH functionality will likely to deter most from using forks.

> it's not going to be open source but you will be able to look at the code and send pull requests. So it's very similar to open source in that you can fix bugs and add features if your changes get accepted by Github, but has the limitation that you can't redistribute your changes by creating your own editor based on Atom if Github should not accept your changes.

So it is open source... Just not free software. Get the terms straight, guys.

Love the double dipping. "GitHub can profit off your code, but you can't do anything with it and have no rights to it!"

well, its not "your" code is it? GitHub have written it. If you don't want them to profit off your work, don't submit patches to Atom?

The whole point is they're trying to have it both ways. They want to benefit from other people's work freely (that's why they're accepting pull requests), but do not want to let others benefit from their work in the same way.

In that case, keep your changes and improvements in your own branch, and don't submit a pull request for them. If you don't want to share it for "free," that's your call.

In production and development, open source as a development model promotes a) universal access via free license to a product's design or blueprint, and b) universal redistribution of that design or blueprint, including subsequent improvements to it by anyone. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

The exact definition of open source is up for debate.

Historically open source and free software have been synonymised in implementation, so it isn't surprising Wikipedia is using that definition.

However originally the idea was open source meant "you can look at and modify the code" while free software meant "you can redistribute the code".

I guess you can define terms however you wish but then you can't expect others to magically know your definition and "get it straight."

There is a commonly accepted definition of open source as published by OSI, and it is virtually identical to the definition of free software.

No, actually this is neither open source nor free software. The Open Source Definition requires the ability to redistribute changes: http://opensource.org/osd

The closest match would be Microsoft's Shared Source licenses.

(Life advice: don't be condescending without also being correct. Actually, you should probably just not be condescending.)

There is a legitimate problem in the software/developer tools ecosystem that everyone wants everything to be free, which means no one can make money building it.

I'm actually looking forward to Github's solution to this, given they are generally pretty smart folk. Perhaps they'll find a model that others can follow.

On the flip side, they do seem to be making money off of services built upon the free software licensed Git.

True. SaaS FTW.

Git wasn't really their codebase though, although, true, they do employ core people now (IIRC/AFAIK).

Pessimistically, given that Atom is not initially/wonderfully open source, if Git had been Github's codebase from day 1, it is likely they would have had the same "crap, we must charge for this somehow" thoughts they are having now, and Git as we know it would not have happened.

This was already posted 13 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7310017

It seems that the answer to this question is quite simply that github want to make money selling the product which seems reasonable. Why is there so much outrage, if you only use open source (in the free software definition) software then simply don't use atom?

Yep, won't be touching Atom.

Totally agree. If you want an open source editor, just don't use atom. It's not that difficult of a decision to make. I hate it when developers feel "entitled" to open source software. No, not everything is open source. There are some pieces of software that you will have to buy.

I use open source software every single day of my life, but I also pay for software. I pay for Sublime Text, it's worth it. If Atom is better than Sublime, sure I'll buy it.

In my opinion paying for something is about supporting the devs so they can continue making great products and feed their families.

It's fine for a company to make a profit, that's why they are a company after all. In a utopian society everything would be free, but we don't live there.

someone mentioned in that thread that the .app file contains a package.json which states it is under an apache license.

I think the default that npm init gives is BSD, so this seems like a nominally conscious decision on their part.

I don't really think it would make sense for github (a services company) to start selling commercial desktop software, but whatever.

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