 One of the most unfortunate things that can happen to you as a user of software is when you become reliant on a piece of software where it's really important. It's vital for your work, for your life, sometimes even. And then this piece of software that you're reliant on, it ceases to exist. It dies, it goes away. And that's what's happening with the Adam Text Editor. Adam was created by the good folks over at GitHub. They created Adam and Electron, I believe in 2011. Adam was the very first Electron app. It was kind of the proof of concept that Electron actually works. And of course, out of that, many, many, many hundreds, thousands, probably, of these Electron apps have been created over the years. And it's a very important piece of technology that allows people to create cross-platform applications, cross-platform, meaning you can create an application using the Electron framework. And it should work on Windows, Mac, Linux. So Adam has a very special place in history as being the very first Electron app. But Adam also has a very special place in the hearts of many users of it. Because Adam is a text editor, and text editors are a very personal thing, especially for people that are very serious about text editing. So if you're, you know, a professional writer, you're a professional programmer or developer, your text editor almost becomes like an extension of yourself. And many people have used Adam since its birth in 2011. And now those people are essentially, I'm not going to say they're being betrayed by the GitHub team, but in some ways they kind of are. So over on the GitHub blog yesterday, we had this post, Sunsetting Adam. And the blurb at the top of the post here says, we are archiving Adam and all projects under the Adam organization for an official sunset on December 15th, 2022. Now this is interesting language, Sunsetting Adam. So what they're doing, of course, they're just abandoning the project, right? They no longer are going to develop Adam. They're going to go ahead and archive all the repositories and be done with it. Sunsetting implies like an actual sunset, you know, the sun goes down slowly, right? So instead of, hey, we're abandoning the project today, well, December 15th, we're giving you about six months for this sunset period to happen, right? And then on December 15th, we're all just walking away. And we're done with this. We're archiving the repos and Adam is complete. Now this GitHub post about Sunsetting Adam, it's not very lengthy. It only is about three or four paragraphs. The first paragraph basically talks about Adam was created in 2011 as the very first electron app, yada, yada, yada. And then why are they shutting it down? And it seems to be that the GitHub team, since being bought by Microsoft, they're focused on other things. Surprise, right? And many, many Adam users actually were worried about this. So Microsoft bought GitHub almost four years ago to the date. Four years ago today, essentially, this week, it was actually, I think earlier in June, I think it was like June 4th, June 5th that the news broke that Microsoft had reached a deal to acquire GitHub for, you know, however many billions of dollars. And the people that used the Adam text editor even then were really worried because Microsoft, of course, maintains their own text editor, VS Code, another electron app, oddly enough. So they've got these two very similar products now, right? Under the Microsoft banner. And why keep both? Why keep two things that do essentially the same thing? And even then, people were like, Microsoft's probably just going to kill Adam and go with VS Code, right? They're just going to have all these people that were working on Adam move to other things. And Microsoft initially said, no, that's not going to happen. We are going to keep maintaining Adam. You know, we have no plans on shutting this down. And that was true. I mean, they waited four years to shut it down. But you kind of could see this coming because honestly, Adam really saw almost no development since Microsoft bought GitHub. And the folks over at GitHub in this post, they actually admit that. They say, as new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, the Adam community involvement has declined significantly. As a result, we've decided to sunset Adam so that we can focus on enhancing the developer experience in the cloud with GitHub code spaces. Now, I'm not that familiar with code spaces, but I actually did look up the code spaces, a web page here on GitHub. And essentially, this is your cloud-based IDE. So this is your cloud-based VS Code. Essentially, it's VS Code in the cloud, which I guess if you're into cloud-based things, I hate this kind of stuff doing everything in the cloud, but I know for a lot of people, it actually does have some real-world benefits. But because essentially they're working on VS Code and then this code spaces, which is essentially cloud-based VS Code, you know, these people that work for GitHub and by extension, they work for Microsoft, they don't have time to fool with Adam. Toward the bottom of the post, they go on to write that the GitHub team recognizes that Adam is still used by a large number of people within the community and that migrating people from Adam to another solution that's going to take a lot of time and energy. And they actually state that, quote, we are committed to helping users and contributors plan for the migration. So when they talk about the migration, I'm assuming GitHub is going to start heavily pushing all of these Adam users over to VS Code and to the cloud-based editor, which is GitHub code spaces. Now, as somebody that has used computers and computer software for most of my life, I've been in this situation before where, you know, pieces of software that I rely on are no longer there one day, right? They just go away. The company behind them, they go away or they just decide to kill a project and move on to something else. And it's frustrating for those that are using Adam. I feel your pain on this. I will say that going forward, I think more people should think about the pieces of software that they rely on and try to protect themselves from being in a situation like these Adam users are in right now, where one day the piece of software that they rely on just goes away. It's one of the reasons why I eventually migrated over to using Linux and free and open source software rather than proprietary software like Windows and all of the Microsoft ecosystem is because proprietary software is especially vulnerable to this kind of stuff. Not that free and open source software is immune to this, because obviously Adam is a piece of free and open source software, but proprietary software especially can just disappear on you one day because it's not a community project. Proprietary software can only be developed by one person or one organization, the proprietor of that proprietary software. So if that one organization decides that's it, that's it. There's nothing you can do about it. The licensing of that proprietary software prevents you from ever doing anything with that essentially dead project. Now, but even free and open source software like Adam, sometimes this happens when projects just the community around it loses interest. And that's kind of what happened with Adam. There were two problems with Adam. So Adam started in 2011 and back then by far the most popular IDE text editor for programming and development was Sublime Text. Sublime Text was and is proprietary software. So Adam was essentially created to be a free and open source Sublime Text. And because of that, a lot of people within the free and open source software community gravitated to Adam. But eventually, Adam kind of fell out of favor. Partly because Sublime Text kind of fell out of favor. Nobody was really looking for a Sublime Text clone anymore because eventually VS Code was created by Microsoft and VS Code kind of became the text editor, the IDE that everyone was using. And then once Microsoft bought GitHub, the writing was on the wall. Anybody that was paying attention, we kind of knew this was going to have been like on day one. That was one of the first things people asked us. What the hell is going to happen to Adam? It's because in the back of our minds, we all knew there's no way in hell. Microsoft is going to develop both VS Code and Adam at the same time. It makes no sense. It's a duplication of effort. One of them had to go and obviously the one that had to go would be the much more inferior product if we're being honest because Adam was slow. It was kind of buggy. Even the GitHub team in this post mentioned that there were some reliability issues even today with Adam, especially in the early days. So if you're an Adam user, where do you go from here? Obviously the GitHub team are going to tell you to try out VS Code. VS Code technically is free and open source software. But the way most people install it through the binary that Microsoft distributes, that's actually proprietary software. It's licensed under a proprietary license. And again, if you were using Adam because of free and open source, then VS Code, the official VS Code is probably not what you want to try out. You want to try out a truly free and open source fork of VS Code known as VS Codeium. But even if you move to VS Code, ultimately you're still putting yourself in a little bit of danger because you're still dependent on this corporation that maintains this piece of software. It's not really a community project. So what you want, you really should move to a truly free and open source community project and one that you know will never disappear overnight on you. And there's two that immediately come to mind. I often tell you guys about VIM and Emacs. And if you are a professional programmer and developer, you really owe it to yourself to eventually investigate those particular text editors because they're extensible, extremely extensible, more extensible than Adam or VS Code could ever dream of. You can actually build these things into an IDE. You can build them into whatever the hell you want to build them. You can make them do practically anything. And yes, there's a learning curve, but that learning curve ultimately is worth it because you essentially write your own text editor. Nobody can ever take that away. And you're never going to wake up one day and VIM and or Emacs are gone. They've been around since the beginning of time. They're never, ever going to go away on you. So yes, there's a little bit of a time sink and an investment, time investment, learning, VIM or Emacs. But ultimately, I think it's worth it just for the peace of mind that you know it's always going to be there for you. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Dustin Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Michael Mitchell, Paul West, Wanya Baldwin, Homie Allen, Armored Dragon, Chuck Commander, Rangry, Diokai, Dylan, Mastrom, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Archimvedore, Polytech, Realiteats, Furlust, Red Prophet, Steven, Tools, Devler, and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these. Fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any sponsors. I'm not sponsored by Microsoft or GitHub or anybody like that. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. Microsoft has a long history of buying companies and then killing them.