From the website, this is a "well funded" startup that is giving away $20 of credits for free to people who use it. They are literally forking 2 OSS projects and turning them into a funded startup, seemingly without giving anything back.
It is unfortunate when people make decisions that have legal ramifications they do not understand, but there's gotta be at least a little personal responsibility here. It's no different for code than anything else. There was a case not long ago where someone who made royalty free music changed their mind and tried to make copyright claims against people who had used their music in their YouTube videos. But can we be fair here? If you released this thing with an explicit royalty free license like that, can you really get mad because you can't get royalties that you clearly didn't expect in the first place?
If you're worried that you may regret releasing your own works under open source licenses, permissive or copyleft, then simply don't do it. The downside is that you can't be a direct part of the open source ecosystem, either by using existing (non-permissive) libraries or by being adopted by other open source software, but the thing is the vast majority of developers are aware of what they're signing up for. If someone makes a million dollars off of your open source software, you can have an expected paycheck of $0.00, and that even goes if it's copyleft. The plus side of this trade-off is that it enables anyone to take advantage of your software, even if they wouldn't normally have the means of licensing a product for their use case, with very low friction, providing the maximum benefit.
Copyright law, though, certainly does let you encode the expectation that "if you want to make money using this you must pay me", so if that's your expectation, don't use licenses that contradict it, especially not just because it is trendy.
It is super easy to release things under AGPL today. If people don't, it is an explicit decision.
And yet people will still get upset when the software isn't used like the way they want it to be used...
> The free tier includes $20 of Claude 3.7 credits!
> Free Claude 3.7 Sonnet access included
This is what really matters, much more than the IDE itself, they are all VS Code forks (and here, just an extension)
Cursor it's somewhat more interesting than others because they have unlimited premium slow requests, and the fact it is free, makes it acceptable that it's not performing well compared to RooCode.
At the end it's very good because the investors of Cursor agrees to pay with their money your usage of Cursor (if you accept a bit of slow down).
But to be fair, RooCode, or any of the forks, it doesn't matter, as long as the investors pay for the credits.
If Claude would do a $200 unlimited RooCode access, then suddenly RooCode would take a large segment of the market I guess.
If this KiloCode wants to differentiate, this is what they could try.