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.

Sorry to tell you, it is not free. https://atom.io/faq "We haven't settled on pricing yet, but you can expect it to be competitively priced compared to similar editors."

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.

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.

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.

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.