Open source isn't about working for free. It's about pooling resources in the community to provide a baseline from which competition can begin. Open source improves the efficiency of the overall system, allowing innovators to focus on innovation, not basic functionality (like operating systems, text editors, web servers, web frameworks, programming languages, virtual machines, etc.)
Google sells advertisements, so they make a free browser that makes the web fast and secure. They improve search to make the web more useful for everyone. They help get third-world countries online. Why? Because when the internet grows, Google grows. They're not working on search "for free".
GitHub might have taken a similar view with Atom: by creating a freely-available, polished, advanced, and easy-to-use programming environment, they might help foster the growth of a whole new generation of hackers that would use GitHub to easily store and share their code, right there, baked into the editor. Universities might pick it up, and it might be featured in coding academy curricula. Student projects might involve writing plugins for it, extending it, and making it their own: often the first task of an artisan is to make and customize his or her tools of the trade. And GitHub would be there, at the center of it all. Rather that some advanced hacker tool shrouded in mystery, GitHub would be built-in to every new coder's first experiences with programming: an iconic brand synonymous with that eye-opening rush of seeing your code work for the first time.
Google sells advertisements, so they make a free browser that makes the web fast and secure. They improve search to make the web more useful for everyone. They help get third-world countries online. Why? Because when the internet grows, Google grows. They're not working on search "for free".
GitHub might have taken a similar view with Atom: by creating a freely-available, polished, advanced, and easy-to-use programming environment, they might help foster the growth of a whole new generation of hackers that would use GitHub to easily store and share their code, right there, baked into the editor. Universities might pick it up, and it might be featured in coding academy curricula. Student projects might involve writing plugins for it, extending it, and making it their own: often the first task of an artisan is to make and customize his or her tools of the trade. And GitHub would be there, at the center of it all. Rather that some advanced hacker tool shrouded in mystery, GitHub would be built-in to every new coder's first experiences with programming: an iconic brand synonymous with that eye-opening rush of seeing your code work for the first time.
That doesn't appear to be their plan, though.