I thought VSC (Visual Studio Code) and Atom were based on the same codebase? I'm sure there are differences in functionality, but if open source is a prerequisite for you I'd suggest helping Atom grow rather than waiting on a licence change for VSC.
Electron is not an editor itself. The Atom editor is built as an Electron app, and so is Visual Studio Code, but Electron is not an editor. It's not even an editor framework. When you hear "Electron", think "Cordova for the desktop". Sort of.
That seems to be the extent of the similarity between the two--that they're each packaged as essentially a single page app for a Chromium-based, site-specific browser runtime.
For more info on VSC, see castell's comment from last week[1] and this post[2] from Scott Hanselman a couple years back (including the comments).
