9 ms·

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 au

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.

holtalanm 9y ago
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. Wherein lies the problem?
- rhizome 9y ago
  "Lynch mob?" Really?
  - holtalanm 9y ago
    yes, really. If you have nothing to actually add to the discussion, please keep your fingers tied.
    - free_everybody 9y ago
      If you are going to counter this aggressively, perhaps consider the emotional response you are masking as logical?
      - holtalanm 9y ago
        "emotional response"? really? 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.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        rhizome 9y ago
        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.
        holtalanm 9y ago
        '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.
  - Grue3 9y ago
    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.
- gus_massa 9y ago
  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.
  - holtalanm 9y ago
    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.
    - bronson 9y ago
      Or, "hey, should we try to put our ads in the minimap package?" It probably doesn't matter if it was intentional hostility or unintentional incompetence. Either way, it needs to be fixed.
- orclev 9y ago
  > Company needs users. sure, that's fine > Plugin has users. Still no problem here. > 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.
  - holtalanm 9y ago
    I get what you are saying, but I still don't see much of an issue here. The ultimate decision to actually _implement_ all of those changes in those existing open source projects lies with the project maintainers/owners.
ohyes 9y ago
On the one hand, I agree with the sentiment. 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.
- holtalanm 9y ago
  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.
  - bobwaycott 9y ago
    It was good execution of a very bad idea.

holtalanm 9y ago

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. Wherein lies the problem?

rhizome 9y ago
"Lynch mob?" Really?
- holtalanm 9y ago
  yes, really. If you have nothing to actually add to the discussion, please keep your fingers tied.
  - free_everybody 9y ago
    If you are going to counter this aggressively, perhaps consider the emotional response you are masking as logical?
    - holtalanm 9y ago
      "emotional response"? really? 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.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - rhizome 9y ago
        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.
        holtalanm 9y ago
        '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.
- Grue3 9y ago
  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.
gus_massa 9y ago
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.
- holtalanm 9y ago
  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.
  - bronson 9y ago
    Or, "hey, should we try to put our ads in the minimap package?" It probably doesn't matter if it was intentional hostility or unintentional incompetence. Either way, it needs to be fixed.
orclev 9y ago
> Company needs users. sure, that's fine > Plugin has users. Still no problem here. > 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.
- holtalanm 9y ago
  I get what you are saying, but I still don't see much of an issue here. The ultimate decision to actually _implement_ all of those changes in those existing open source projects lies with the project maintainers/owners.

ohyes 9y ago

On the one hand, I agree with the sentiment. 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.

holtalanm 9y ago
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.
- bobwaycott 9y ago
  It was good execution of a very bad idea.