Please don't say 'fully open source', as it confuses the language.

"Open Source" is a well-defined term[0] . What Tom Preston-Warner describes there is basically the same as Microsoft's "Shared source[1] " licenses, which do not fit the definition of Open Source.

[0]http://opensource.org/osdhttp://opensource.org/osd

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_sourcehttp://en.m.wiki...

Notice he says that it wouldn't be fully open source.

Of course chimeracoder noticed this. That's what he was talking about. Because "open-source" is a binary condition, being "not fully open-source" is like being "not fully pregnant" — the phrase is just an equivocation that ultimately means the same thing as "not open-source."

But a family with three daughters can be "not fully pregnant". Parts are pregnant, parts are not.

I don't think anybody would ever say a family with three daughters was "not fully pregnant." You would say some members of the family are pregnant and others aren't.

And anyway, this wasn't the sense in which Preston-Warner used the phrase — he did describe what he meant, and it was not open-source software. It was, as chimeracoder said, similar to Microsoft's "shared source" program.

A better phrase would have been "not entirely open-source".

Is there any chance this change of heart has to do with his departure? Perhaps the team always wanted to commit to being fully open-source, and he was the blocker.

Or perhaps GitHub wants to salvage their reputation in the Tech circles by doing "something good" without too much business loss (selling text editors probably isn't very good business).

GitHub's reputation in tech circles is extremely good. Don't confuse the noise with the signal.

GitHub's reputation is conflicted at the moment. It has had a lot of support, but some events do raise warning bells. Only time will tell whether they are actively ensuring their work environment is something I will continue to support. The exit of Tom is a good sign, but since we can't know what terms there were, the only logical thing is to hope they are good to their word.

You are conflating the reputation of github the company that provides services to hackers and github as a place to work. Entirely different reputations.

I buy Orson Scott Card books, for example.

And that's an example of the multitude of different 'colors' of consumers. Card's comments kept me from purchasing his stuff. I read it, sure, but I sure as hell didn't purchase it.

Some people don't partition the reputations of corporate 'entities' into separate walks of life.

I dont.

That's not how reputation works.

Salvage their reputation? Are you talking about that inappropriate behavior by one of the cofounders incident? Because if you are, consider that you may be significantly overestimating its influence on the elusive "tech circles".

> [TPW] said in February that Atom wouldn't be fully open-source

That's under-promise/over-deliver in action my friend :)