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.

Comments

So?

[apoc.famine]

Developer shits on own code. Fork it before the ad insert, and keep using it. If you really need it to do your job, either take over the fork, or hire someone else to do it. Is this really rocket-science? And how does this undermine open source? Clickbait headline.

Re:So?

[KiloByte]

In this case, it's a shit little package that requires no real maintenance, so forking is an option.

But what would you say about Firefox dropping sound support (PulseAudio might work on some machines, but not on any I own), degrading the UI to TabsOnTop then Australis, dropping most useful extensions (in FF 57), and so on? Do you, or any small team, have the resources to keep maintaining Firefox? PaleMoon is a proof it's not as easy as it sounds.

Likewise, when OpenOffice went apeshit, it was saved only by a bunch of companies funding LibreOffice.

Or, despite MATE being so much better than GNOME, it's the latter that's the default in most distributions.

"Just fork it" isn't that easy.

Re:So?

[kurkosdr]

If your objections run deep into the code or the UI layer, then indeed forking is not an option. The only real option is either finding a new software package or compromising. But if we are talking about a superficial adware addition, then fork, remove adware, push and you are done. At least open source now has a business model that doesn't involve "selling support" (which is something home users don't buy): Sell the open-source project to some greedy company, fork it, use the money to fund further development.

Re:So?

[Kjella]

"Just fork it" isn't that easy.

Nobody said it was. But to steal an expression from 4chan of all places, the open source community is not your personal army. It's got lots of activists and wannabe generals who wants to tell "the community" what to do and by that they mean the rank and file developers because they're too busy leading. To which the developers generally reply that they're doing their own thing for their own reasons and if you're not happy with it, you can fork it and do your own thing for your own reasons. Sure most take input from users and other developers, but only as advice - it's not a democracy.

The result is that 99.9% of the time it's just a lot of huffing and puffing but nobody willing to actually do the job or try organizing an effort to do the job or it fizzles almost immediately as said person loses interest. The company level is essentially the same, Red Hat, Mozilla and Sun/Oracle/Apache does what they want. They don't owe you a version of Linux/Firefox/OpenOffice that works the way you want. The code is free, but the labor is not so if you want it done differently it's up to you. It's the open source way of saying no. Not proprietary software-no, but as in "you're on your own there buddy".

It's actually much worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Injecting ads into the free tools doesn't seem any worse to me than "open source" project companies that ship a free but hobbled "trialware" open source edition and then sell a commercial closed-source solution of the same tool. (This is pretty common with companies/projects that reserve "enterprise" features behind a paid model.)

It's actually much worse, for a couple of reasons.

1) a fully functional, free tool can become very widely used and relied upon, then ruined by this sort of thing, causing real disruption to a lot of people and/or projects.
2) it's a bait and switch scheme, promising one thing, then pulling the rug out from under everyone's feet and delivering something suddenly very different
3) if forced to fork, that eats up a bunch of other folk's cycles and energy for something that should have been totally unnecessary. That's thought and energy that is now unavailable for other projects they would have perhaps preferred to work on, so the knockon effects of this sort of thing can become quite multiplicative (in a negative way)

At least with crippleware, you know it's crippleware the moment you download it and can remove it (or buy the commercial version if for some reason you're impressed). It may be annoying, but it's a far more honest business model than what these clowns are doing.

I would consider doing business with an honest company, even if I'm not fond of their marketing approach. Only a fool would knowingly choose to do business with people who engage in these kinds of dishonest bait and switch programs.

Re:It's actually much worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't bring reality into the Open Source Reality Distortion Field! Just fork everything and maintain it yourself!

Re:It's actually much worse

[hey!]

Well, things are somewhat different for developer tools than they would be for end-user tools. As a developer you can always pull the code for the latest release and comment out annoying bit. Unless the annoying bits are part of some extensive rearchitecting, it should be straightforward.

Contrary to being "contrary to the open source spirit", this is exactly the open source spirit. I do what the hell I want with my code, and if you don't like it you can change it. For ordinary users the freedom mantra can sometimes ring hollow, but it shouldn't for a developer.

Recent Trend??

[Luthair]

Open source hasn't been a few giant projects in the 25 years I've been programming, its always been tens of thousands of projects often written by one person and very few were vetted.