> - discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open source. Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test of time.
If you like Atom and still want to use it, you can fix potential bugs yourself and make it evolve, you can't with a proprietary one. You can also fork if project take a different direction that you would like. When gnome3 came up, some people who preferred the gnome2 desktop metaphor started mate and cinnamon, the former forking gnome 2 to port it to gtk-3 while the later forked gnome3 to adapt it to work more like gnome2.
> - you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time in or money in will be the leading tool in five years.
Nobody has to use the leading tool. My preferred IDE is neovim which is kind of a niche project. While they are the leaders there is no reason for me to use Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code if I am not comfortable on them.
> If you like Atom and still want to use it, you can fix potential bugs yourself and make it evolve...
If "you" is "a company or sponsored non-profit with sufficient development resources to dedicate some to taking over and evolving the editor," sure. If "you" is me, and I suspect 99.99% of Atom users, this seems like a pretty unrealistic ask.
This isn't a criticism of the open source model, to be clear, but this has always struck me as one of the weaker arguments for it having an advantage over closed source models. There are certainly examples of successful forks and revivals, but there are also examples of projects that never got sufficient uptake to continue when the original developer moved on (e.g., the Ted RTF-based word processor), and probably many more projects that just seem to exist in a kind of limbo state, technically still developed but not really seeming to put much effort into keeping up with the world -- off the top of my head, Unix's JOE and JED editors and the famous native Mac editor TextMate, which arguably inspired a raft of later editors including Visual Studio Code. And in practice, closed source projects that get a sufficient level of usage are likely to stick around and keep being developed, too. There are always exceptions, but usually if something continues to be sufficiently popular -- which, in the closed source world, is roughly equivalent to "profitable" -- it's going to keep being supported.
> If "you" is "a company or sponsored non-profit with sufficient development resources to dedicate some to taking over and evolving the editor," sure. If "you" is me, and I suspect 99.99% of Atom users, this seems like a pretty unrealistic ask.
I've used several projects (mostly libraries) that got abandoned, and only two I had to adopt and maintain myself, and those were pretty low maintenance. If there is a community around it, somebody (who isn't you) might step up, so you don't have to do it.
The original point was how much time and effort is spent to save a pittance in the grand scheme of things. You're confirming how much effort is spent by rich engineers not to pay money. I know there is a principle, but in the end it's still so much effort.
If you like Atom and still want to use it, you can fix potential bugs yourself and make it evolve, you can't with a proprietary one. You can also fork if project take a different direction that you would like. When gnome3 came up, some people who preferred the gnome2 desktop metaphor started mate and cinnamon, the former forking gnome 2 to port it to gtk-3 while the later forked gnome3 to adapt it to work more like gnome2.
> - you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time in or money in will be the leading tool in five years.
Nobody has to use the leading tool. My preferred IDE is neovim which is kind of a niche project. While they are the leaders there is no reason for me to use Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code if I am not comfortable on them.