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Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

kite.com

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Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#501

Post by mrguyorama »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #269
mythz wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JetBrains IDE's is the most notable exception of dev tools I personally pay for, insane value and productivity makes it a no-brainer purchase given its instant ROI from time saved. Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few $'s.

JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.

Also, even though it's "expensive" for an individual user, you own a full version forever!!! That makes the several hundred dollar price tag much less of an issue.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#502

Post by kmeisthax »

RupertEisenhart wrote: post #484
candiddevmike wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until Microsoft grants Copilot users blanket protection over copyright claims from Copilot generated code, I wouldn't even think of touching it.

Do you mind explaining why? What do you think will happen? This is a serious question, I'm apparently just unaware of the horror-stories that can come out of breaking copyright. (Not from the US so..) For me its most useful for helping with bash scripts and small simple stuff, just saves a huge amount of time I would spend googling and checking small things. Not sure if copyright is relevant there or not, it certainl…

ML text and image generators have a habit of regurgitating training data, especially if you happen to use certain inputs or prompts that also match said data even superficially. For example, type in "fast inverse square root"[0] and get out a bunch of Quake source code.

If you use code or art generated by an AI that was regurgitating training data, you can be sued for copyright infringement.

The way that AI gets training data these days is... questionably ethical. It's all scraped off the web, because the people who make these AIs saw court precedent for things like Google Books being fair use and assumed it would apply to data mining[1]. Problem is, that does nothing for the people actually using the AI to generate what they thought were novel code sequences or images, because fair use is not transitive.

[0] This won't work in current Copilot because a) I'm misremembering the comment phrasing and b) they explicitly banned that input from generating that output.

[1] In the EU, this practice is explicitly legal

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#503

Post by a-bashtannik »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #438
LASR wrote: post #235

> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. I know this first hand, building a developer tool startup and failing to reach any level of revenue. In the end, the tech was bought out by a larger company to recover a fraction of our VC investment. The challenge is that when you're building software for developers, they already know how it must work. It's like trying to sell magic tricks to magici…

I've paid for jetbrains multiple times, even though it's quite expensive for someone making money in a a third world currency. I pay for copilot. However, I would never pay for stuff that I can get free. I could talk to my company to buy it, but I would settle for something close and free if it come to that.

People in 3rd countries use pirate copies / cracks very often. In my country (Moldova) that's absolutely OK having everything pirated even in government structures. AFAIK all JetBrains products are available cracked.

I am an individual developer and I pay for my PHPStorm and GitHub CoPilot - it saves me so much time, I could never imagine. This software is completely worthy to be paid for, even considering "free" copies are available.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#504

Post by mrguyorama »

icemelt8 wrote: post #422
batushka3 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Should I stop using US made products because they funded the genocide in Iraq?

If you think what the US did in the middle east was bad, you ABSOLUTELY should stop helping america profit. Just because nobody has the balls to actually punish america for the horseshit we have pulled, doesn't mean it's not the correct thing to do.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#505

Post by danenania »

bjarneh wrote: post #371
brandelune wrote: post #356

The AI hype is finally over. Meta's language models, GH Pilot, real life car auto-pilot. When it fails, it fails big. And the "we were 10+ years early to market" is just a big lie that bought them plenty of VC money. Good for them.

> The AI hype is finally over. At least partially over. It's one of those things though; when you first see what's possible with neural networks it does get your hopes up. When you later realize the limitations, it's hard to walk back your old claims. Even Elon Musk has to realize that FSD is never going to happen by now. Google with all their learning and training data, still can't correctly find and smudge license…

The Google Maps smudging point is an interesting one and definitely worth considering, but the incentives at play are very different. While I'm sure they want to be seen as making an effort, Google isn't rewarded in any way for achieving high accuracy in their smudging. It just has to be "good enough" to the point that they aren't getting in trouble for deliberately neglecting it. For this reason, I'd imagine the resources they devote to it are quite limited. It's not having billions poured into it like self-driving AI is--while I have no inside knowledge, I'd guess the budget is orders of magnitude less.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#506

Post by hbn »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #269
mythz wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JetBrains IDE's is the most notable exception of dev tools I personally pay for, insane value and productivity makes it a no-brainer purchase given its instant ROI from time saved. Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few $'s.

JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.

I'd pay for it if I did enough programming in my day-to-day life that it would justify the cost. But I only occasionally get into the swing of doing a project, and even then I've never made money off of any of them.

I still have my university email (graduated in 2020) so I've been renewing my student license that gets me a free license for the occasional times I use them.

I kinda wish they'd just go for the Winrar or Docker business model, where it's free for individuals but businesses have to pay up.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#507

Post by newaccount74 »

origin_path wrote: post #482
newaccount74 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. > I know this first hand, building a developer tool startup and failing to reach any level of revenue. Just because your startup failed doesn't mean an entire category is unsustainable. I've been living from sales of a developer tool for the last 10 years, and there are plenty of other paid developer tools out there that show developers absolutely d…

Could you talk a bit more about your success? What does it do, what pricing model do you use, how long did it take you to acquire customers, do you feel it's worth it? Asking for a friend, of course.

I don't want to talk about it in detail, because I am trying to stay anonymous on HN.

It's a Mac app, pricing model is perpetual license with paid upgrades for major new versions (every 3-5 years). Customers are roughly 50% individual devs and 50% companies who buy for their employees, and a bunch of educational licenses, but I don't earn much from them.

I got initial traction by being mentioned by some popular bloggers and twitterers, but I only started making a full time income after two or three years. I think marketing is mostly word of mouth, and lots of people using the trial version who eventually buy a license, but for the most part I have no idea how people find my app.

As for whether it's worth it -- it's a cushy job, I can take care of my kids and don't need to worry about putting in enough hours, because nobody cares how much I work.

On the other hand it does get somewhat boring after 10 years. I've been hearing the same feature requests and ideas for improvements for 10 years. My customers are all the same average tech dudes like myself. Sometimes an interesting bug shows up, and when I track it down that's the highlight of my week.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#508

Post by skrtskrt »

mrguyorama wrote: post #501
qwerty456127 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.

Also, even though it's "expensive" for an individual user, you own a full version forever!!! That makes the several hundred dollar price tag much less of an issue.

And the price goes down every year you renew for like four years I think? By year 4 you’re getting the all products pack for like $150/ year

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#509

Post by nl »

Jenk wrote: post #416
nl wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, for a number of reasons: 1) It's the code license that matters, and the depends on what license the code the developer is building is using 2) License compatibility is undecided (see eg the different views of Apache Foundation and FSF on the compatibility of ASF 2.0 and GPL) 3) It's easy for someone to deliberately produce code that violates a license. MS is a big target and you can bet license trolls would chase…

3) is not a good reason. "Big fish" is not an excuse to not provide protection. The burden to protect others from harm as a direct result of a feature of a product is on the owner of that product.

Not if it opens them up to false claims.

Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code

#510

Post by BMorearty »

bombolo wrote: post #488
BMorearty wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes I’m sure my boss is shaking in their boots about being liable for how I spend my own money on my own time for personal projects.

The entire topic of the discussion was engineers buying their own work tools. You went OT. It happens. No reason to be snarky about it.

Disagree. The comment I replied to was about personally paying for tools. My read was that they meant for personal use. And you started the snark, not me.
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