Tempest in a Teapot
This is an optional plug-in in a minor code editor, it's not the end of the world. As mentioned in the story, if people don't like it, someone will fork it. This is on top of the fact that some of the people running the Atom project don't seem to think it's a bad idea.
I suspect that if Kite had been open about what they were doing, it would have been accepted as a good feature.
As an aside, I have read that what Kite is doing is trying to collect large numbers of samples of "work in progress" code so that they can train their auto-completion engine. Offering this as a free service is simply their way of getting unpaid guinea pigs to work for them providing those code samples and what choices they subsequently made. I'm not sure I'd really want to volunteer for that aspect of things.
PPS - I listen to a number of Python related podcasts. I can't recall any of the interview guests saying they use the Atom editor (one of the standard questions which these sorts of podcasts ask is "what editor do you use?"). Everyone seems to use either VIM, Emacs, Sublime, or PyCharm. Occasionally it will be something else, but I can't recall Atom ever getting a mention. There's loads of IDEs and editors which have syntax and other support for Python, so if the Atom developers decide to "do evil", they could lose their user base pretty quickly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
