In my experience, open source projects that are primarily backed by companies fail to create a real community of developers. Therefore when the company dies, development stalls.

RethinkDB was something that I though would still go strong without the backing. I never used it and was never involved, so I'd love to hear what happened when the company died.

(One exemption is Xfree86 though, which was forked successfully by to community to Xorg if I recall correctly)

It's not going very well for RethinkDB, sadly: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6659

That's true, and I want to add that usually it's the company's fault for not guiding the project into the hands of the community (be it intentionally or because of incompetence). Rust is a great example of a "company's project" that reached (or is reaching) a nice spot in autonomy.

I agree but I think Github and Atom are special cases.

A light IDE is not rocket science and this project is known (and loved) by many open source developers.

Sure they can't "kill" it, but a huge fraction of the work on Atom comes from full-time people employed by GitHub. They can handicap it to the point that VSCode becomes the better editor.

I think the popular opinion (and my own) is that VS Code has been the better editor for a long time now. Performance, features, and reliability have all been drastically better, its one weak spot might be the slightly more limited interface for extensions.

I think it already is tbh.

They could probably also merge the two somehow. The one thing I like more about Atom (even though I don't use it anymore) is editing the editor settings gives you a UI instead of just a JSON file which I don't mind, but it's kind of uneeded to me to have to work harder just to check all my editor settings.

Atom is really just a testbed for electron, where the real technology lies. If you can make an editor that programmers love using electron you can make pretty much anything else (excluding games).

Why not games?

https://electronjs.org/apps?category=games

HTML5 and Canvas do work on Electron after all. :) I feel there was some post on HN about a game released under Electron to which the reaction was "I didn't know it was made with Electron!" not a month ago.

Edit:

Also Atom wasn't a testbed for Electron. Electron WAS MADE for Atom afaik. They only opened up Electron after Atom was out for a while, it'd be the other way around if what you're saying is the case. I think Microsoft is already heavily invested in Electron. If anything they will provide even more resources towards Electron itself.

sad. Atom has much better usable UI. I get constantly lost in VSCode menu and (strange enough) it is very difficult to startup a browser in it.

Someone has to maintain it.