Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

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I'm going to take a contrarian stance on this one: I believe there is no story here — adding an ad for an opt-in cloud-based tool to dev tools is not spyware. It's opt-in! It's clearly stated. Would people raise a fuss to find out their CI service like CircleCI or linter service like Code Climate had access to their code (it's sufficiently obvious)? I don't really see why this tool is any different other than they are one of the first to make a code analysis service that runs in realtime.

I beta tested the Kite product when it first launched maybe two years ago. I don't use it today but I would try it again. Since then they've only tightened down on permissions and made things clearer.

Kite was also not the first to run ads in an IDE plugin (Wes Bos has sponsored several), at least not in Sublime. Personally it's not my preference to have ads either but ultimately this is up to the maintainer of each repo. The tool is still free to use. It clearly states that using the cloud engine will upload your code to do analysis in the cloud. It's 2-3 sentences, not like it's buried in some long EULA.

Shame on the article for labeling inserting an ad as "taking over" and labeling an ad as "spyware"… pure clickbait targeting non-devs.

The new Kite engine also clearly states it is a cloud-based service and they build integrations for their service. The whole industy works the same way. You don't have to use their engine to use autocomplete-python and its opt-in too.

It is opt out. You can read the comments from the Kite developer yourself.

https://github.com/atom-minimap/minimap/issues/588#issuecomm...

Your comments are such a poor defense of a dubious feature I wonder if you have a connection to Kite.

It appears you have misunderstood my argument. The atom-minimap extension you linked is not the autocomplete-python extension discussed in the parent thread. I have not used the atom-minimap extension and didn't make any comments on it — I use Sublime. My comments are about the autocomplete-python extension.

I think you're overlooking the diagram linked above which shows enabling the Kite engine is an opt-in button click. The CEO also states that it is opt-in in the article: "Most users who install autocomplete-python close the engine selection prompt, which results in not getting Kite or its benefits," [the CEO] said in an email.

https://outline-prod.imgix.net/20170721-QVaxMDgDwdZ1TBufCdq4...

As I stated above, I beta tested the Kite product early on and have used it in Sublime through a similar add-on. I am not a current customer / user, but I do make my own dev tools. It was always completely transparent to me that they are sending code to their server to run a cloud analysis platform. Based on that, I still maintain that the community is massively overreacting to something that was made explicit upfront.

Well, who benefits from having the ads there? Wouldn't it be better for most users without the ads? What value is Kite adding?

It's a slippery slope, similar to the controversies over using BitKeeper for the Linux kernel or adding DRM to HTML5 (both justified, I think). The openness in open source needs to be defended.

While I would not argue anything about ads directly, I think that all users benefit from having additional options in the plugin, and if the ad is relevant to a portion of users and leads to some users discovering an additional dev tool for their workflow than it was worthwhile. That is the perspective I have in mind for the hypothesis that Kite was testing.

I genuinely don't understand why this service is getting a disproportionate amount of backlash relative to the plethora of cloud based services out there that analyze one's entire codebase. Maybe it's because they're interacting with the code from the dev machine directly vs integrating with repos on the git server? Would that make it different to you?

The massive difference is that Kite is using manipulative, dishonest tactics.

When I sign up for a service like Code Climate it's very clear that I am giving them access to some of my code. I also have easy control over what code they can see. They are honest and upfront about what they are doing and why.

Kite has been trying to hide what they are doing, with the goal of tricking developers into doing things they otherwise wouldn't. They're taking advantage of the huge amount of trust in the open source community. Kite must know that abusing this trust has a high chance of hurting the community, but they don't seem to care, as long as they can make a quick buck or two for themselves.

A lot of people here really cherish that trust and goodwill among strangers in the open source world, and are understandably pretty pissed when someone comes along and messes with it.

The bottom line though is being honest and upfront with developers. I suspect Kite could have been a bit more forward about what they were doing and the developer community would have reacted with much less outrage.

Where I work, the VPE signed up for Code Climate. Code Climate also gets our code by asking for git creds, making it very clear what they're doing.

Installing Kite and accidentally allowing them to sucker me into uploading the entire corporate source tree -- quite possibly with creds -- is literally a walk you out fuckup. At bare minimum I would have to page ops and roll creds on every bit of prod. Want to know why there's both a gitignore and a git commit hook making sure 'config/creds.py' is not uploaded anywhere?

There's virtually no ethical way to build that dialog unless you put 40 point red font saying "We upload your entire source tree" and make you wait 10 minutes before continuing. This is not a decision line level devs are allowed to make on their own, and Kite tricks them into doing exactly that.

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