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Comment by rawland

8 years ago

Kudos to @mehcode for the fork [1]! And the author @abe33 for the apology [2]! I'm thinking, that @abe33 might not be responsible for this, but was "asked" by his employer (Kite) to do that.

Then, there are alternatives such as sublimetext/vscode, which have the minimap builtin...

Disclaimer: Not affiliated, I prefer n/vim anyways. This is a copy from my comment in the issue. Please read @abe33's comment [2] in the issue. This might explain a thing or two.

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[1]: https://github.com/mehcode/atom-minimap-plus

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

10 comments

rawland

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nase00  8 years ago

That's a pretty sorry excuse for an apology, in my opinion.

First, he focuses heavily on how much stress the backlash has caused him. Then he tries to paint it as a "misunderstanding" on behalf of the users. None of this strikes me as the behavior of someone taking full responsibility for their actions.

Further, I keep seeing people trying to justify his actions with the pathetic excuse that he was probably just doing as told by his employer. Sorry folks, that's not how being an adult works. There's a reason virtually every formal code of ethics stresses personal responsibility. Take, for instance, 8-b from https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics

  Engineers shall not use association with a nonengineer, a corporation, or partnership as a "cloak" for unethical acts.

Or the very first point from http://www.acm.org/about/se-code

  Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest. In particular, software engineers shall, as appropriate:
  1.01. Accept full responsibility for their own work.

Just because we're in the comparatively-"lower stakes" profession of web development, that doesn't mean we can use the sorry-ass excuse of "my boss told me to do it." Unless they held a gun to his head, he had a choice, and his choice should stick with his reputation for better or worse. Now his name is going to be attached this dumpster fire of a PR mess because he didn't have the will or integrity to say no, and smart people within the community will have a very good reason to no longer trust his judgement, much less his future contributions.

danso  8 years ago

Thanks for posting abe33's apology, hadn't seen it when I read about this issue last week. One of the more unnerving things about it was how he made this change without explanation months ago nor did he did he explain it now. It must have been frustrating for him, as the plugin's original developer, to be dragged through this crap. He ultimately is responsible for his actions, but I wonder if he knew that subverting his own plugin would be a job requirement?

  • laurent123456  8 years ago

    I can't imagine he would sabotage his own project for no reason, so most likely he got the job or some compensation in exchange for his cooperation and access to his repository, probably how they got python-autocomplete too.

    Otherwise, if they offered the job with no conditions attached he'd be under no obligation to change his own personal projects for them.

    • danso  8 years ago

      Yeah, I was wondering if Kite had a deliberate strategy to inject themselves into popular IDE-plugins, and their hiring plan includes reaching out to such creators. It's not unthinkable that they would slip in such an obligation after the contract is signed. I mean, we're talking about a company that conspired to covertly slip in these dark-pattern ads into mainstream open-source plugins. Ideally, the minimap creator could have taken a moral stand and quit, but I imagine his work situation and prospects (being from Europe) is different than if he were a developer in the Bay Area.

      2 replies →

    • rawland  8 years ago

      From @abe33's comment:

        Secondly, even if it may seems to come late, we've heard you and decided
  to revert all the changes related to the python links feature. The next
  release will no longer show anything. I'll also make sure that the relation
  between Kite and the minimap package are as clear as possible. I've been an
  employee at Kite for over half a year now and this plugin is now
  officially maintained by Kite.

    • danenania  8 years ago

      Even if there was nothing contractual, being asked to do something like this by the CEO after starting a new job would make anyone feel pressured to play along and not make a bad early impression.

    • sharemywin  8 years ago

      fine print my freind...fine print...ie giant unreadable employment contract.

      only speculating but truly possible.

  • rawland  8 years ago 

      > It must have been frustrating for him, as the plugin's
  > original developer, to be dragged through this crap.

    Completely agree.

    Then, this sets a precedent. It reminded me of Google injecting some binary code into Chromium [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409]. However, we have a single person here. I can wholeheartedly imagine, that this can cause quite some stress. Also, it could have happened to many, I think...

    Edit: I'm happy about the discussion here. At least, this won't happen again, anytime too soon.