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by aerotheck 3205 days ago
I concur. Although the thing that troubles me most about them is that for both Atom and VSCode, the binaries that are distributed by their parent companies are not a direct compile of the public source code. They use the MIT license to their advantage, clone the repo to make it private, make changes to that private repo and then distribute the binary compiled from it.

In this sense, among the popular options only Vim and Emacs live up to my expectations. Also IntelliJ possibly.

1 comments

This is demonstrably false. Atom's official distributions are built on public CI platforms (Circle, Travis, and AppVeyor) from 100% public repos.
Oh sorry, I suppose I misunderstood something. It indeed is made from public repos.

But then again, I researched a bit and found the licenses to be a bit problematic, not that of Atom itself but the additional packages that are bundled in the binary. It includes some packages whose licenses are unknown and others such as Facebook's libraries(a lot of them) which have the non-free BSD+patents license. In totality the license of the binary doesn't seem to be a really good one.