378 karma · joined December 6, 2013
https://image.ibb.co/hXi53J/screenshot.png
15 inch MBP.
There's a reason Linux and GNU utilities are so massively widely used, and overall they've probably provided billions in economic value. They do that freely, for any human to use, and in fact that's part of their main value proposition. Both were born out of the legal nightmare that was UNIX at the time.
How should he get paid for this? In a very-ideal world, people and corporations that used his idea and had spare capital would voluntarily give him donations. In a better-than-this world, governments (or some other entity) would pay bounties to inventories out of a pool of tax money, based on both perceived usefulness of the invention and how widespread its use came to be.
Admittedly I don't think Atom is a very worthwhile text editor, but using an augmented text editor as an IDE is a very common practice.