Atom by GitHub is a code editor that was released to the public a few months ago. It was a step into unknown territory by GitHub. a web-hosting service home to over 12 million repositories. But it payed off well, Atom was compared to the likes of popular text editors such as Sublime Text and even Emacs.
The idea was conceptualized over 6 years ago, with an active development time of 2.5 years. But now, GitHub has decided to open-source all of Atom. Though many of its packages and libraries were already open-sourced, the code for its core application, its package manager, and application framework are now available to every developer on this planet.
Atom developer Nathan Sobo says,
“As a programmer individually, and all of us at GitHub, we want to use tools that are open source, that means we have control, transparency, we can be confident that the tool is going to be around as long as we need it to be around…It’s better for the product to have a big, vibrant community around it.”
Atom will still function as a stand-alone product from GitHub and will have packages that will integrate closely with it in the near future.