Hacker News Reader

> developers began noticing something: Kite had quietly injected promotional content and data-tracking functionality into open-source apps the company previously had no affiliation with. The discoveries of those injections, and Kite’s initial refusal to roll them back, led to backlash from programmers who felt the company’s actions undermined the open-source community.

https://qz.com/1043614/this-startup-learned-the-hard-way-tha...

I was looking for such comment to understand why the GoodByeAds (which I use with NextDNS) contains a record for kite.com (which means I'll have to add an exception to access kite.com).

> functionality into open-source apps the company previously had no affiliation with

To elaborate, they bought the open source projects and put in the content without informing people that they were now in control of the project.

Linking my own comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33686715

The only shady thing that I recall is that they quietly added telemetry into Atom after they took over maintenance of it, without communicating this to Atom users.

> added telemetry into Atom

Weren't they uploading source code without clear communication?