Comment by 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?

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danso

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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.

    • gfodor  8 years ago

      This would actually be a smart and ethical strategy, if the changes were made in a way that they were opt-in and clear about what they were doing. Unfortunately it looks like they got greedy, and this is what happens when you dance the line: much easier to cross it.

      1 reply →

  • 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.