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How dare they collect usage data to improve their free product!!!

• jumpwah 13y ago
  It's not free (as in speech nor beer). Unless something has changed (I haven't been following), it will become paid after the beta period is over.
• paukiatwee 13y ago
  Sorry to tell you, it is not free. https://atom.io/faq https://atom.io/faq "We haven't settled on pricing yet, but you can expect it to be competitively priced compared to similar editors."
  • flaviusb 13y ago
    If one takes Vim, Emacs, or Light Table as 'similar', then that would imply free...
• aidos 13y ago
  I believe that the final product isn't going to be free - so that changes the landscape of the argument. Then again, maybe they won't have analytics in that version. Note: I'm not making a comment on it being a paid for app - they've released bucket loads of open source code they wrote to create the editor. For that they should be praised.
• sveme 13y ago
  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.
  • hugofirth 13y ago
    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.
    • sveme 13y ago
      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.
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
  • younesrafie 13y ago
    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?
• ksk 13y ago
  Executing analytics code consumes CPU and network resources that I pay for so I do think people should have a say in what a third party does with them.
• devcpp 13y ago
  If it's "free" then you're the product (in this case, a promotion for Github). And I think I have the right to refuse to be sold if there are better alternatives. They'll either have to step up their game (with FOSS) or lose me.