Open Source

They locked us outside of freedom

Recently, I saw myself forced to use a Mac. And then, finally things became clear: why I don’t like macs, and why people do like it, and why Linux is not popular.

It is quite simple, honestly – closed-source software works incredibly well with other closed-source software, and incredibly bad with any open standard.

It’s the equivalent of creating a comfortable city, with filtered air and water, but that somehow makes you allergic to natural air and water. And then, they convince you that natural air is bad for you.

So, let’s dive a little on my experience with Mac – remember, I use Linux most of the time, my wife also uses Linux (by choice, by the way, although basically nobody believe me when I say that, and no, she’s doesn’t work with computers), so my whole life is somehow based on open standards. So, the first thing I tried on my Mac was to start some open standard services – OpenSSH, VNC, for remote access…
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

A sun sets, a pulsar is born

Recently Microsoft announced that the destruction of the Atom editor – I already posted about that, but I want to say that the community response for the sunset was really wonderful – in the beginning, I really thought that the Atom editor would die with the Microsoft announcement. But after posting on a lot of channels, and a very organized “call for arms”, we were able to organize ourselves and create something wonderful – the atom-community is now more active than ever, and indeed there is work being done right now.

People decided join our discord servers; we are reimplementing the API that will be discarded by Microsoft, and modernizing the editor like, for example, bumping tree-sitter and Electron (we now can run Atom on Electron 12); we also will need to rebrand it, and the name chose – Pulsar – could not be more fitting: it’s easy to remember, it basically means a “star that dies, but starts to spin faster and give bursts of radiation”.

I also was able to somehow bootstrap the editor without the original “bootstrap script” from Atom (that is famous to not work correctly, and also need an older version of Node.JS). I was also able to build binaries of Atom with “electron builder” – it’s library from the electron community to build the binaries instead of the way Atom do today (that is a bunch of scripts).

So this makes 5000 lines of code less that we have to keep of Electron scripts – except for the fact that there’s actually a lot of things in Atom that depends on things that these 5k lines do – like some plug-ins that misbehave when you don’t run the scripts, and all the test code that currently will not even run if you don’t bootstrap things.

So what this means for the Saturn editor? Is it the death of the product, like, will Pulsar will be basically the editor that I want to have? And unfortunately, it seems the answer for that question is “no”.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago