It's their decision to track their own users by default. It's anyone's decision to criticize them for their decision. That's healthy and much more efficient than for everyone to start creating their own text editors, payment systems, airlines or poultry farms.

I for one am more than fed up with hunting down and keeping up-to-date with settings for tracking "features" in every single piece of software I use.

And it's my decision not to use it. Why would I want a non-free (as in beer and speech) editor which reports data to Google, only works on Mac, and lacks any unique features? I don't understand the hype created on HN about it...

> please feel free to create your own program with this feature disabled.

I could do that very easily, if Atom were FOSS.

FAIL. A text editor with this default is just wrong.