Just 10 weeks after GitHub debuted the public beta of its programmable text editor, Atom, the company announced that it is making the project open source and available to everyone.
“As Emacs and Vim have demonstrated over the past three decades, if you want to build a thriving, long-lasting community around a text editor, it has to be open source,” wrote GitHub developer Nathan Sobo on the project’s blog.
Up until today, 80 of Atom’s libraries and packages had been available as open source while the editor itself remained closed source. Today’s announcement includes open-sourcing the core application, its package manager, and Atom Shell, its Chromium-based desktop application framework.
“Our goal is a zero-compromise combination of hackability and usability: an editor that will be welcoming to an elementary school student on their first day learning to code, but also a tool they won’t outgrow as they develop into seasoned hackers,” to Sobo in an earlier blog post.
GitHub will continue to support Atom’s development. It is currently working on version 1.0, but will first tackle improving performance, stabilizing APIs, and releasing it on Linux and Windows. At the moment it is only available on OS X 10.8 or later.
“We think being open source will help us get there faster, and more importantly, source access will give you the transparency and control you’ve told us you expect from your tools,” Wrote Sobo.
Atom will be open-sourced under the MIT License, and is available at GitHub.
