Guys it's not OK to just hijack open source projects. You need to make (or fork) new plugins specifically for kite, not hire a bunch of developers of popular autocomplete plugins and have them shadily change their plugin to use Kite as a completion engine.
they didn't. they just had them add _support_ for Kite. It was up to the user to enable it. I'm failing to see the issue here. I mean, yes, their UIs needed work, but they admitted to that mistake and have since fixed it (according to the article).
Your comment makes me think this is more of an open-source lynch mob rather than someone looking at this objectively.
Company needs users. Plugin has users. Plugin does things company's flagship product _could_ do (and it is _free_). Company reaches out to Plugin developer and they come to an agreement to add support for the flagship product into the Plugin, but the new support is _not_ enabled by default.
The problem is that the screen was not clear enough. Users just press Continue, Continue, Agree, OK, Share all my user directory, Install, OK, Close. They never read the small or big letters, they just click the green button. The "Enable local engine" looks like a "Cancel" button.
That's how you get installed an unwanted browser bar, a new amazing search engine, and the Norton security pack for 60 days.
If you see the screenshot carefully, by default they are asking permission to upload to their servers the content of your user directory "Enable access in Users/kite". Go and take a look at all the info you have in the subfolders of your user directory. [1]
My guess is that most people just expected that the current file was uploaded, not all the py files. Perhaps only the current line, not all the file. And many didn't read the dialogs and they just pressed enter.
[1] They only support Phyton, so they uploaded only the .py files, but I guess that in the future they can extend the search types to C and upload the .c, .cpp, .h, .inc, ... files too. Do they have to ask again or the current permissions are enough? What if they extend the search to .doc and .xls? What if they extend the search to images? Go again and take a look at all the info you have in the subfolders of your user directory.
Once again, that sounds more like a fundamental flaw in the service/software and less like malicious intent.
I'm probably not going to use their service any time in the future, but to imply they intentionally put users in the dark is kind of a stretch.
More like, they failed to communicate how their service worked. Also, they failed to provide a clear distinction between the two options for completion engines that described both objectively.
Honestly, it sounds to me like they were just overly-excited to sell their service, and didn't take a step back and say "hey, do you think this wording makes Jedi look a little overly-bad?" They could have done with some user-acceptance testing on this, for sure.
I feel like part of the disconnect is that Kite uploads source code to servers. In a perfect world with perfect security and 100% honest people, this is no big deal. The world doesn't work like that.
The last thing that I or my employer wants is our source code sitting on someone else's server - even if it's for code completion. My employer's code is proprietary. Period. If I mistakenly enabled Kite when working on some of this source, it's a huge deal. That is grounds for termination, and I am sure there are many other programmers who are in the same boat.
It's probably not a big deal that someone's code is on there, but there are big implications. It doesn't matter that it probably won't be seen. If the source has been leaked to a 3rd party, it would be negative. My employer doesn't give two flips about fundamental flaws and malicious intent. They care if it did or did not happen.
> Plugin does things company's flagship product _could_ do (and it is _free_).
Yep, all kosher.
> Company reaches out to Plugin developer and they come to an agreement to add support for the flagship product into the Plugin, but the new support is _not_ enabled by default.
… and there's the problem, that's not what happened. First it's not entirely clear, but it's implied that they paid the developer to add support for Kite, that may or may not be OK, but at the very least it raises some questions. Secondly, they made Kite the default choice when installing the plugin, and also had some shady dark patterns in the chooser dialog to try to bias people towards using Kite while downplaying the risks it poses.
Even with all that, that's not what really got people furious, all that, although shady, isn't really wrong per say.
Where they went wrong, was when they then went out to a different plugin, that had nothing at all to do with the product the company was offering and shoehorned extra functionality into that plugin specifically for the purpose of showing their products ads to users. To be clear, they chose the plugin specifically because it was popular, not for any other reason, this was PURELY a marketing driven decision. Had they picked another plugin that did something similar, I.E. showing links to docs for libraries being imported, and then worked with that developer to link to their docs that showed the ads that might be one thing (still a bit shady), but no, they wanted to get the most ad impressions they could, so they added a completely unrelated feature into an existing plugin. Further muddying the waters, they didn't just "partner" with the developer for a "business relationship", they straight up hired the guy, which raises all kinds of questions about their relationship to this open source project.
This was a perfect storm of bad decisions, they started out making some questionable decisions, nobody really noticed and they got good results back, so they decided to crank it to 11, and then when people did notice and called them out on it they initially doubled down and then finally went into full damage control mode.
In the first case, the project maintainer/owner was asked to make the change, and it's implied possibly paid to do so. But as previously stated, that particular case wasn't that bad, since the only thing shady there was the use of some dark patterns to bias people towards Kite while somewhat obfuscating that it would disclose their source code.
In the second case, because they hired the project maintainer/owner, that made Kite effectively the project owner, and as was established, the thing people are really angry about was the second case. So yes, Kite is 100% to blame as the project owner (via hiring the project owner).
I suppose there are probably two lessons to learn here. First, if something is a major open source project that's widely used, it would be a good idea to make sure there are multiple project owners/maintainers with veto powers to keep each other in check. That wouldn't stop a company from hiring ALL the owners/maintainers on a particular project, but it would at least increase the difficulty, particularly if they were geographical distributed potentially forcing the company to work out employment in multiple countries.
Secondly, when a company acquires an open source project, they are obligated to follow the norms and expectations of the open source community, at least if they don't want to have said community complaining about (and eventually forking) their newly acquired project. Since presumably they found value in the project, it's in their best interest to not upset the community thereby reducing or destroying that value. As such, any action they take that could be construed as giving favor to their commercial products over others (particularly other open source products), or which would introduce ads into the project, need to be considered VERY carefully and great care needs to be taken around how those sorts of things are implemented and introduced. In particular making sure all your ducks are in a row by making sure you get buy in from a significant portion of the products user base before rolling the changes out.
There was a guy calling for a communist-style "purging" of anyone involved with this company in the last thread. I think you're underestimating how mad people get about free plugins for their (incredibly bloated and inefficient) code editor.
I'm not masking anything. If you would like to read between the lines, then by all means, feel free.
I'm looking at this whole situation without passing any judgement. Looks to me like we have a classic case of a company completely failing to execute properly on an idea.
Did they fail? Yes, spectacularly. Was there malicious intent, or some form of intentional shady practice going on? I think the current evidence doesn't support that.
You are absolutely passing judgement when you equate the blowback against Kite with extrajudicial (and mostly racist) murder. That you doubled down in your flagged comment instead of acknowledging the (being charitable) hyperbole raises questions about your judgement. No offense.
That said, by deed and by words (per their apology) they executed on an "ends justify the means" business model. They wanted more business, they came up with the idea of buying open source projects, took a stab at integrating their functionality with the projects, and people didn't like it.
Don't tell me the people don't have a right to choose how they respond to Kite, business reputation is an actual thing and you can't browbeat people into ignoring their feelings on the issue.
Regardless, whether their strategy was malicious and/or shady is a value judgement best left to the individual, and there appear to be a variety of opinions on the matter. Note that @abe33 does not list Kite as an employer, so it would appear he's hedging his bet on how awesome this idea is.
'equate the blowback against Kite with extrajudicial (and mostly racist) murder'
I didn't say anything about race anywhere. way to read between the lines again and attempt to make my original comment look WAY more inflammatory than it actually was.
I was more equating it to large groups of people getting up-in-arms and angry without actually taking a step back and looking at the whole situation.
To say that is a lynch-mob mentality is 100% accurate.
"lynch" is a racially-coded word in 2017. Google "lynch racially coded" and check the first few hits. That's the mine you unintentionally stepped on here.
On the other hand, if it is really that shady, it is on the open source developer to say 'no.' As described here, it doesn't seem that shady. There was a choice between Kite and Jedi for the one plugin, and for the other plugin, it was basically an AD.
On the gripping hand, I really want open source developers to get paid, this seems like a way for open source developers to get paid. It makes me more sympathetic to the idea that this was poor execution of an ok idea.
I'm in that boat as well. Initially, I was thinking this all was done with ill-intent. But now that we have heard Kite's side, it sounds more like just poor execution of a good idea.
