Kite Responds to the Minimap and Autocomplete Issues (opens in new tab)

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?

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.

> Let’s be clear: the absolute last thing we wanted was for someone’s code to get synced to our servers without their knowledge.

I don't buy it. The UX was dark-patterned to enable this very thing, and this reads like damage control when it's clear it wouldn't fly under the radar.

If it were the last thing Kite wanted, there would be a big warning that this option uploads your code to their servers. Or some mention of the upload at all. Or it wouldn't be the foundation of Kite's business.

The clear dark pattern here should also have been addressed: Kite is listed with all its shiny features, whereas the alternative simply gets called inaccurate and incomplete. Local analysis does have some clear advantages over Kite, even excluding important privacy concerns. What if you're offline or are in an area with poor network coverage?

https://kite.com/static/media/autocomplete-python-flow.690d3...

The use of dark patterns is more of a policy/"culture" thing that people won't exactly "knock" (although there was a comment on the HN thread last week about this) or demand the removal of, but it does speak to how Kite is willing to operate, not just pre-minimap fiasco, but going forward too.

Edit:

The link to the PR in the post isn't the point here, it's the propensity to write misleading copy targeted at thousands of devs who had never heard of Kite that went unaddressed. Open source is extremely trust-based (how hard was it to believe that a text editor plugin of all things was doing funny things?), and Kite needs to talk about whether it will continue to behave as a potential bad actor.

Right now, all the post contains is an apology for a PR fiasco that occurred due to something akin to a miscalculation, not a deliberate onboarding strategy.

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.

I interviewed with Kite a number of years back. From that experience, I am entirely sure that they really had no malicious intent with any of this. That being said, I did tell them that IMHO they were severely underestimating the privacy concerns of developers. Looks about right.

Fuck Kite. This is obvious damage control after the backlash of their severe betrayal of the open source community. They’re not sorry they did what they did; they're sorry they got caught.

The title “Staying Open” is so full of BS it hurts.

We're sorry? start by changing this

https://github.com/kiteco/atom-plugin/blob/master/LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2017 Manhattan Engineering, Inc - All Rights Reserved

Reproduction of this material is strictly forbidden unless prior written permission is obtained from Manhattan Engineering, Inc.

This comment is very sightly off-topic for this story, but 100% on topic for HN, and so many people might find it useful that I feel compelled to write it.

The first link in this write-up is to this story which gives the background:

  https://theoutline.com/post/1953/how-a-vc-funded-company-is-undermining-the-open-source-community

And I wanted to draw attention to something remarkable from that write-up. Without any irony, completely straight-faced, the writer nonchalantly included the line:

   >Although Kite has no business model yet, it’s widely
   >thought in Silicon Valley that having users is the
   >first step toward profitability.

The article had introduced the startup as:

   >a $4 million venture capital-funded startup

That's not a valuation but the size of the round.¹ The title and subtitle of the article are:

   > How a VC-funded company is undermining the open-source community

and:

   >A San Francisco startup called Kite is being accused
   >of underhanded tactics.

Now what I wanted to bring attention to in this comment is the fact that it is possible to nonchalantly mention that a startup has no business model, and is a $4 million VC-backed business, but this tells you nothing about the startup: except that it is based in Silicon Valley/San Francisco.

I really want to emphasize this geography to you, because people here are skeptical.

We had a recent article here on "Ways a VC says no without saying no". One person wrote ², in complete denial:

   >a few years ago when trying to raise a Series A. We
   >were getting the "location" excuse over and over. It
   >usually went something like, "we love what you are
   >doing, and we would probably invest in you, but your
   >location is a non-starter for us." The truth, as was
   >illuminated to me during, is that they just aren't
   >interested. If you were a compelling enough business for
   >the investor, your location would not be a factor. If
   >you can prove that you are succeeding in your location,
   >then the location obviously isn't an issue.

VC after VC after VC mentioned the exact words "your location is a non-starter" but this person is in denial.

I wanted to use this story to illustrate that you do not even need a business model in order to raise money in Silicon Valley/San Francisco. It is there in black and white and without comment, mentioned off-hand in a story about something different. Memorize these fourteen words. Memorize these words now: "A San Francisco startup"; "$4 million venture capital-funded"; "has no business model yet."

Just memorize it. It is the difference between the success and failure of your startup and if you read this comment carefully and take it to heart, this comment can become the most important one you will have read in the past five years.

¹ https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kite-com

² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14815785

> Staying Open: Kite Responds To The Minimap and Autocomplete Issues

I have two problems with that title:

1) Implies that you were open in the past, which Kite really wasn't, and 2) "Issues" is an understatement and borderline misleading. A more accurate term might be "debacle".

> Kite has been knocked around in social media (and the actual media)

"Knocked around" - sounds like victim language to me. You weren't knocked around - you were:

1) Caught red-handed, 2) Called on the carpet for your deceptive and bad business practices, and 3) Lost reputation and standing because of the choices you made.

If anything, it was you, Kite, who "knocked around" millions of minimap users by your irresponsible and unethical actions. In fact, reading the Github issue thread, it looks like your actions may have cost Atom some users.

Shame on you guys. The backlash wasn't anything that Kite's actions didn't warrant.

> How did we get ourselves here? We started Kite with the idea that machine learning....

Please don't attempt to turn your apology into an advertisement for your business. Maybe that's not what you intended, but that's how it reads to me. I'd feel better about this blog post if it talked less about how awesome Kite is and more about how awesome the open source community that held you accountable is.

-------------

While I appreciate that Kite is (somewhat) owning up to its mistakes, I'm concerned that, had there not been such a vocal community backlash, Kite would never have self-corrected this move.

I think hiring a Community Manager is a step in the right direction for Kite. Hopefully, he/she will work with the open source community to tell anyone else who tries to pull these types of shenanigans to, "Go fly a kite." [1]

[1] http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/Go+fly+a+kite!

> As we considered our options, we had a novel idea: buy an open source plugin, reward the author for their work, and expose new users to Kite.

That’s the root of the issue. Someone built a well, and offered its water for free to the community. Theirs was a good-faith effort that you subverted when then you paid the maintainer to help you turn people who came to the well into customers.

I don’t understand how you didn’t see that as problematic from the outset – at the very least, you could have first created an open API (akin to LSP) where others could add their own Kite-like service. That would have respected the spirit of open sourcing.

The main problem here is one of trust. If you're going to share your code with a third party like Kite, even without getting into the possible legal issues involved, you have to be damn sure you trust the company. Kite's culture has already shown to be deceptive, and these actions are really not drastic enough to imply they're committed to change.

> We’re on the HN homepage, with 900 upvotes, and passionate comments. All great, except for one thing: we are the scourge of the internet. How did we get ourselves here?

Well it's not surprising, is it?

From the outline article:

>> Then he blew this reporter off. “I apologize in advance that I can't answer any further questions,” he wrote. “I need to focus on other parts of the business, including continuing to improve the product for our users, and conflict like this is always doubly distracting.”

As others have pointed out, the key issue is that Kite thought it was a good business practice to ask a hired open-source developer to integrate Kite ads into their heavily used projects. They wanted a shortcut to users at the expense of open-source ethics.

Yes, open-source developers should get paid. But if they take this route, they may lose credibility within the community.

The updated dialog still feels kinda slimy (https://github.com/kiteco/kite-installer/pull/50). It makes no mention that search and usages are paid add ons (https://kite.com/pro).

Not buying it at all.

How does the announcement of Kite Enterprise (twice!!) fit within the supposed "apology"?? It has absolutely nothing to do with either project.

It's ironic actually. Within their "apology" they are doing the EXACT same thing they are apologizing for: sneaking in some more advertising of their products.

This is one disgusting company.

Just in case someone here didn't already say this:

Do not use Kite.

It's software that was made by people who are fine uploading your code to their servers. The kind of people who should be out of business as soon as possible.

It is nice to see a more extensive explanation, even as the motive is to save face. But the apology, like the incident itself, feel like symptoms of a flawed strategy.

> How did we get ourselves here? We started Kite with the idea that machine learning could help eliminate the repetitive parts of programming. We spent three years building the initial product - and it works. Our software has really great completions, conveniently sorted by relevance instead of the alphabet, among other features that are proving useful to coders.

> We’re proud of the tools we’ve built - the problem we faced was finding a way to tell potential users about the thing we created. As we considered our options, we had a novel idea: buy an open source plugin, reward the author for their work, and expose new users to Kite.

Many eminently useful plugins and software have been able to endear themselves via word of mouth and user happiness; Homebrew, Bootstrap, and Atom come to mind. And plenty of programmer-optimized software can even charge good money, such as Textmate and PyCharm.

Advertising isn't a bad way to get exposure, but yeah, I do agree that Kite's approach was "novel". It'd be as if the official CDN version of React wrote console messages about how great Instagram's new Snapchat-like features are. Even if Kite's injection of self-promoting code into a popular plugin was harmless, it felt exactly like the kind of shady tactic that people cynically suspect user-data-in-the-cloud companies to partake.

The critique of Kite was not the only Kite-related article to get a huge number of HN upvotes; Kite's initial announcement and a followup about Python features got 1,138 and 553 upvotes [0] respectively. That (plus the VC funding and connections you already had) is enough to get a critical mass of interest. If Kite hasn't gotten the desired userbase a year later, advertising isn't the solution. In each of those HN discussions, as well as on Reddit, the primary concern was the cloud hosting of code. Maybe it is impossible for Kite to be full-featured as a locally-hosted product, but most users seemed unconvinced because they were apparently unable to see the value of Kite over what offline IDEs are able to do.

Kite's response shouldn't have been "the same concerns were raised for tools like Dropbox and Github [which]are now used without hesitation" [1], but to focus on a minimal viable local product that would become popular enough to have the same kind of trust/popularity that Github and Dropbox earned (hard to imagine either being successful if not for their generous free plans). Undertaking a strategy that re-emphasized people's concerns about the cloud and Kite's unclear privacy policies is just not a good look.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=kite&sort=byPopularity&prefix&...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/4erjy4/kite_program...

So I guess this is the kind of thing that RMS wanted to prevent when he talked against unofficial packages and repos in Emacs.

Hope these guys run out of funding

I generally think HN'ers are too quick to boycott, but this seems like a level of malicious action that will be very difficult to recover from, both for Kite and it's principals (including the maintainers who sold out their user base).

Taking over an unrelated open-source project and attempting to monetize it's users (without being very open about what you're doing) is unethical in and of itself.

Using dark-pattern UX to manipulate those users into making poorly-informed decisions is even worse, and doing it in a way that potentially violated privacy and confidentially expectations is even worse than that.

I admire the commenters here who chalk this up to an honest mistake, but my viewpoint is a bit more cynical than that. The most likely truth is that knew what they were doing, knew it was wrong, and did it anyway because it benefited them.

Now they come out with a self-congratulatory crisis management non-apology which seeks to minimize their bad actions at every turn. I'm not buying it.

@OP: This will probably get ignored, but on https://kite.com/languages

why u no Elixir support?