Comment by bauerd
8 years ago
There is a fork[1] that reverted the changes made by Kite.
This is not a question about sustainability as the project was well supported, feature-complete and saw regular releases.
Rather, this questions the consequences of giving companies permission to acquire community efforts. Doing so erodes trust in the Atom ecosystem. If the Atom team is OK with what Kite is doing, then I can expect other companies to follow along, and I'll have to be more cautious when installing plugins in general. It also destroys the incentive of contributing code to Atom plugins, because I don't want to contribute to giving companies control over basic features like a minimap. Why stop at the minimap? StackOverflow might as well hijack CTRL+F, or Heroku might subvert a git plugin.
If we let this become a trend, it will suck for everyone.
The consequence of forks is that their desired userbase is now seeing double, and whenever a potential user asks about it someone from the community tells them, "Don't use the one with ads and/or other junk, use this one instead."
If other companies follow along then Atom's ecosystem-- and therefore, Atom-- will suffer as a result.
Regardless, there probably should be more caution when installing plugins.
Yes, I agree, forks are another bad consequence and usually undesirable (though there are exceptions, e.g. it worked for the Node.js community). Had Kite not subverted the plugin, there wouldn't be a need for a fork.