We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don't need Enterprise features.
We also retained our Team pricing plan for people who need email support (and a couple of other features like code owners).
In general we think that every developer on earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, and so it is great to remove price as a barrier.
I've seen numerous posts noting the sharp decline in contribution soon after the acquisition was announced.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601451
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934
Without an official explanation, given the timing, it'd be reasonable to assume you pulled development resources away from it, the exact thing you actually went on Reddit to claim you wouldn't do:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...
P.S. I've observed that these kinds of posts tend to turn into a place where people shit on Atom in favor of _insert preferred other editor here_. Feel free to do that here too, but just note that I'm not going to be obliged to engage since it's completely orthogonal to the topic at hand. I think any remaining Atom users at this point are likely already painfully aware that Atom has long since lost the war in developer mindshare, but don't let that stop you from pouring salt on the wound.
If not, what's the goal of the complaints? I.e. why do you keep bringing this up if you know this is water under the bridge?
I'm a github user, though I wouldn't call myself a fan exactly, and I don't really know how "teams" works or why it's valuable. I came to this thread to learn more, and I find your comments grousing about Atom again. Hence my question.
I looked through my own post history and it looks like I did reply in a thread about this topic a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606843
(same thread that I linked above)
I can only speak for myself as to why I posted here. And I really just want an answer for the question I posted (I'm not naive enough to believe a post like this has any chance of changing project priorities at a megacorp). I wrote about this in a bit more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22875388
And judging from the upvotes, a decent number of people want the same question answered. If you don't care about the answer, my recommendation would be to simply collapse the thread, downvote if you must, and move on.
I'm honestly puzzled as to why so many people seem to be actually offended by the very fact that I'm asking the question, and even seem to be taking it somewhat personally, even though it's not directed at anyone other than the OP.
Mostly I'm curious, just like you. You're curious "what happened to Atom development", I'm curious why people bring this question up over and over on unrelated GH threads when they already seem to know the answer–to wit: active feature development on Atom by Github/MSFT has stopped and will not resume.
I don't see the point of derailing threads/starting editor flame wars over this question, but I am frequently missing some crucial point. So I ask: What am I missing? What's the point of these "what about atom!!" questions when you know the answer already?
These are the actual questions I'm trying to get at:
What made Github/MSFT stop funding Atom development when their CEO went on record to say they won't?
And why haven't they announced that was the case officially?
If the very same CEO then goes on an AMA on Hacker News, surely it's fair game hold him accountable to previous public statements and ask him to clear the air. If this was just some random scrub posting their thoughts on the acquisition I definitely wouldn't have wasted my time to bring this up.
> What made Github/MSFT stop funding Atom development when their CEO went on record to say they won't?
Because circumstances changed and it made no sense to continue to do this. Atom shrank as VSCode grew by leaps and bounds, there's no clear business case for continuing to develop a withering product.
> And why haven't they announced that was the case officially?
Why would they? Why go out of their way to print upsetting news (to some) in a 40pt headline, when the writing is already on the wall for anyone who cares to read it? i.e. what's the benefit to the company of doing this?
I think the better question for the Github CEO was "why did you ever promise to continue supporting Atom? You either knew this was not possible, or were making a promise you could not keep, either one is bad." And the answer to that is probably "to avoid creating a furor around cutting Atom off at the same time as the acquisition was announced." But yeah hearing him say that would be useful.