Good to see that post. If M$ really does keep it’s hands off of GitHub (except for infusions of cash), then great.
The acquisition may actually been nothing more than making sure that one of the tools that they are depending on a lot these days didn’t get bought by one of their rivals for tech supremacy (Google, Apple, Amazon, …).
Although I do worry about M$, I’d worry a lot more if it had been Oracle, for example, when I think of the lawsuits etc. about making the Java API proprietary.
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Thanks for pointing out xray to us!
After reading through their README and updates, I think that this actually might have been one of the reasons MS wanted GitHub, esp. with the ideas for Eon.
Atom suffers from memory and performance issues, Xray should solve those. As M$ wants to be able to bind you to their products no matter what platform you are using, it makes sense that they’d want something fast and portable as the basis of a super, extensible, multilingual IDE, to win over the skeptical developers.
The dream would be for Microsoft to make products that modernize the american office, i.e. scripting languages instead of excel. Maybe the github acquisition might help that goal in some way.
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A very concise and technically correct summary in The Economist (may require subscription):
Contains nothing new to the developers here, but it is interesting to see how the purchase is reported on in business news for a lay audience.
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Surprisingly, there is no more open-development of xray since june!
It is also shocking how with only 19 contributors has had ~7500 stars…
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Pertinent xray github issue:
What is the status of this project, given the recent microsoft purchase announcement #104
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However eager former Github employees might be, I doubt Atom will be maintained by paid employees of Microsoft.
Here is my prediction for what will happen to Atom
- Microsoft won’t cancel Atom dev, But won’t support them either.
- Naturally Atom dev team will shrink over time, they can post a job opening but there won’t be many applicant. Because everyone who works at MS or wants to work at MS knows that Atom is out of the grace of company politics.
- So, over time there will be fewer and fewer paid people maintaining Atom. But since it’s open source project, would volunteers will fill that hole? I don’t know. but it seems to me, contributing to VScode is more attractive for my resume If I ever want to apply for jobs in MS.
MS won’t actively burn Atom into the ground, just won’t care at all