While i'm confident that Atom will not "die" any time soon, if MS pulls the team that's currently working on new features and reassigns them, then at best it's going to be a large blow to the project.

A fork won't have the same team working on it, a fork won't have the same domain knowledge over the internals, a fork won't have the roadmap or what was currently planned and how to do it, a fork won't have the same unified development effort (if MS "kills" atom, FB won't be the only one picking it up, there will absolutely be others that won't like the direction FB is taking, and now you don't just have Atom, you have AtomFB, Atom2, NuAtom, etc...)

It won't be that big of a deal at the end of the day (it's not like there is a shortage of competition in this area), but I would be much more on-board with this if MS handles Atom well.

Nuclide (https://nuclide.io) is what FB uses/develops internally. I think even if the original team departs, they are going to be just fine. They could hire the original team right away if needed.

MS wouldn't pull the team; it would be GitHub that pulls the team. GitHub is operating as an independent company.

It is, now. A year down the road...?

So MS is just going to pay engineer salaries to maintain a free tool used by FB?

The way I see it, it's not worth the risk of Facebook forking it and essentially getting control of the community of developers who are using Atom. A better way to do it IMHO, as other people in the thread mentioned, is just integrating Microsoft products like Azure to promote their enterprise offerings (where they make their money).

Eventually, though, they might want to allow an easy transition to VS Code in some way to cut redundancies but doing it too soon would anger too many people. Atom seems to be losing market share anyways.