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How a VC-Funded Company Is Undermining the Open-Source Community (theoutline.com)
Adrianne Jeffries, reporting for The Outline: Is a $4 million venture capital-funded startup stealthily taking over popular coding tools and injecting ads and spyware into them? That's what some programmers fear may be happening. It is one of the most troubling scandals to hit the open-source community -- a robust network of programmers who work on shared tools for free -- in recent memory. It started back in April, when a programmer noticed a strange change to an open-source tool called Minimap. Minimap has had more than 3.5 million downloads, but like many open-source tools, it was maintained by a single person who no one knew much about other than their username: @abe33. At some point, @abe33, whose real name is Cedric Nehemie, was hired by Kite. Kite was started by Adam Smith, a successful tech entrepreneur who raised funding from a slew of big names including the CEO of Dropbox and the creator of WordPress. It is unclear what Kite's business model is, but it says it uses machine-learning techniques to make coding tools. Its tools are not open source. After being hired by Kite, @abe33 made an update to Minimap. The update was titled "Implement Kite promotion," and it appeared to look at a user's code and insert links to related pages on Kite's website. Kite called this a useful feature. Programmers said it was not useful and was therefore just an ad for an unrelated service, something many programmers would consider a violation of the open-source spirit. "It's not a feature, it's advertising -- and people don't want it, you want it," wrote user @p-e-w. "The least you can do is own up to that." "I have to wonder if your goal was to upset enough people that you'd generate real attention on various news sites and get Kite a ton of free publicity before your next funding round," @DevOpsJohn wrote. "That's the only sane explanation I can find for suddenly dropping ads into the core of one of the oldest and most useful Atom plugins." [...] Although Kite has no business model yet, it's widely thought in Silicon Valley that having users is the first step toward profitability. Adding users potentially benefits the company in another way, by giving it access to precious data. Kite says it uses machine learning tactics to make the best coding helper tools possible. In order to do that, it needs tons of data to learn from. The more code it can look at, the better its autocomplete suggestions will get, for example.
Slashdot's ex parent company did that EN MASSE. People think this is a new issue and it's not. Old and dead projects are rewoken with adware built in and sent off to those who mistakenly download it.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
For those who use Atom & the minimap plugin, @mehcode is maintaining a clean fork with additional improvements and no Kite garbage: https://atom.io/packages/minim...
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
It has been done: @mehcode is maintaining a clean fork with additional improvements and no Kite garbage: https://atom.io/packages/minim... https://github.com/mehcode/ato...
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
The summary is a bit unclear. The phrasing of "it appeared to look at a user's code and insert links to related pages on Kite's website." reads as if the tool is inserting adware into the projects on which it's used. Indeed, this phrasing is straight from the article. But upon closer reading, it seems the ads are in Minimap's interface as used by the developer. This is a bad thing, but it's not nearly as bad as inserting adware into the projects your users are shipping.
You sir do not understand what it takes to make a modern IC.
If intel hypothetically open sourced a recent i7 layout, HDL code, and synthesized netlist it would not help almost anyone except a direct competitor. Mask sets alone for the current nodes are many millions of dollars (ho-hum 28 nm for example STILL costs well over $1M for masksets alone, 7-10 nm are obscenely more). But it gets worse, intel's masks are only compatible with intel's own fab, so you would have to go re-layout the chip, which is many $M's of man hours of effort. After layout of each block you have to spend many more $M's for the tools to properly extract and simulate each piece to assure it functions at a decent clock rate, as often the testing and verification of digital chip IP exceeds the actual design effort.
Open source software sort works in large part due to the very low barriers to entry. You can get a cheap PC and a free compiler for well under $1k and get started coding and compiling pretty quick. Getting any hardware running near state of the art takes large teams and deep pockets, and each botched fab run can cost many $M's.