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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.
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.)
This whole "If you don't like some idiotic changes made to a piece of open source software you have to fork it and maintain it yourself!" attitude is killing the open source community.
It just encourages division and strife, instead of collaboration and progress. Forking should be the last resort.
What's worse is that for most users the best option is just to find some other alternative. Sometimes this alternative is proprietary.
Firefox is a great example of this. It has been one unwanted change after another for years and years. Yeah, there have been some forks, but most Firefox users just find it easier to switch to Chrome, Safari, Edge, or some other non-Firefox browser. Now Firefox's share of the market is in the low single-digit percent range.
Debian is another. Systemd was forced on Debian's users, and this ruined the stability and reliability that many of Debian's users had come to require. Using GNOME 3 as the default desktop doesn't help, either. A small number of people tried to create the Devuan fork, but most other serious Debian users just moved their servers to FreeBSD or OpenBSD, and started using FreeBSD or even macOS on their workstations. Now Debian has become nothing more than a Fedora clone, with the main difference being you type "apt" instead of "dnf" to install packages.
Some people will point to Xorg and EGCS as being cases where forking was good, but I think that's misleading. The forking in those cases only served to set back the development of those projects for several years.
Telling users to fork a piece of open source software is basically the same as telling them to fuck off and use proprietary software instead.
Plus it appears the code's been backed out: https://github.com/atom-minima...