Kite Responds to the Minimap and Autocomplete Issues

At companies like my former employer, developers were given the power and responsibility to vet their own tools. Despite somewhat strict compliance needs we were able to allow junior developers to customize their own IDEs and plugins, since personalization is crucial for productivity. One of those compliance needs was, crucially, that _source code in its full form must not leave the developer's machine except en route to the git repo._

We were comfortable with this posture because the Atom/Sublime/VSCode plugin ecosystem has largely been dominated by honest OSS projects, especially the most popular ones. Thanks, Kite, for ruining that for everyone. I will now personally vet every plugin that my junior devs install from here out thanks to your example.

"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.

> 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.

An apology that starts with 4 paragraphs of self-congratulation is not a real apology at all. Nothing of the article reads as being genuinely regretful of the strategies taken - it's just sorry for being caught.

>Unfortunately, while trying to make programmers’ lives a little less complicated, we instead made them more complicated.

Barely an admission of guilt, and even that can't get past without patting themselves on the back for the noble cause they 're profitably working towards. Yes, Kite, your pay-for service clearly has my best interests in mind. I forgive you for being too stupid to grasp your superior approach. How about actually finding fault with hijacking projects for advertising in the first place?

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.