It doesn't matter whether it is free or not. My only aim was to provide information that might be relevant for some people interested in trying out Atom (admittedly I mixed this information with my personal position towards Google and the ever-present tracking aka surveillance) so that they know the implicit price of its usage.
You are free to use Atom or anything else, but you should always have as much information available as possible to correctly judge what you pay for any given thing.
Except you aren't providing information in a vacuum - you are also providing a negative personal opinion. I would rather see responses which purport to educate include a more balanced perspective such as the potential benefits such analytics might confer to end-users in the long run.
I fully respect peoples right to privacy. I just wish those who frequent Hacker news were more accepting of the fact that privacy is a trade off; one which often comes at the expense of the benefits of sophisticated analytics.
Are you serious? You expect me to provide a Fox News fair and balanced response in any of my comments on Hackernews? I could understand your point if I would have tried to be polemic, but I surely wasn't.
The other position was already provided for by github and numerous other posters, while I pointed out a fact that was not yet mentioned.
By the way, "benefits of sophisticated analysis" for whom? Google's ad revenues? I actually agree that github could provide a better product with the information gathered, but I really don't think that google should be in between me and github.
isn't that the purpose of the free software community? you find a malicious feature then you modify the software source code and release a clean version for interested people?
You are free to use Atom or anything else, but you should always have as much information available as possible to correctly judge what you pay for any given thing.