![]() To a user installing autocomplete-python, it may have appeared that developers unaffiliated with Kite were endorsing it as the better option. There was no mention of the new ownership in the new setup screens or in the package’s repository on GitHub. The autocomplete-python setup screen Image: GitHubĪnd although it was certainly no secret that autocomplete-python now supported Kite, Kite didn’t announce that it had bought the plugin, nor did the plugin’s original developer, Dmitry Sadovnychyi. The Kite option was displayed prominently, listing all of its features, while the Jedi option was deemphasized and described as “lower accuracy” and “less complete.” They added a screen that asks users whether they want to enable Kite or use Jedi, the open-source completion engine the package had previously used by default. “The way that we structured it, it was structured as kind of an acquisition,” Smith said.Īfter the acquisition, Kite developers got to work integrating their completion engine into the plugin. Although autocomplete-python is an open-source piece of software with publicly-accessible code that anyone can freely copy, reuse, and distribute, Kite purchased the plugin from the programmer who originally developed it. What Kite was buying, of course, was not the package’s freely available code, but its ubiquity among Kite’s target audience. “We got into a conversation with him and that’s kind of how it started.” “And so it kind of just seemed like, OK, well, this is an open-source thing the developer for autocomplete-python probably just wants the best completion experience for his users,” Smith said. But unlike Kite’s plugins, autocomplete-python had a large built-in user base it’s a popular add-on among Python developers who use Atom and has, to date, been downloaded nearly a million times.Īfter testing autocomplete-python using Kite as its engine, Smith said, it ran faster than it did on the engine it was currently using. When a programmer installs the plugin, it provides code suggestions as they type, just the thing Kite was built to do. The autocomplete-python package is an open-source plugin for Atom, the popular code-editing software made by GitHub. “And we saw this Atom package called autocomplete-python.” “We were like, OK, well, what else is out there, you know, and how do they reach people?” Smith said in a phone interview. Kite had implemented the features in its plugins for code-editing apps, but the team wanted to find ways to get their software in front of more developers. Kite’s unorthodox marketing endeavors began in late 2016, when the team had just finished two and a half years of development on the app’s core functionality. Their favorite feature in the app, according to Smith, was its ability to intelligently make suggestions about how to finish writing a bit of code as a programmer types-similar to how smartphones suggest words as you tap out texts. “Kind of crazy that anyone would think this is okay.” “This is not cool at all,” wrote one developer last April, in a comment thread on GitHub where users were discussing the promotional injection. Developers saw the promotional injections, which forced Kite content into their coding apps, as unwanted advertising, and saw the data-tracking as an invasion of privacy. This is a story about a company that, in the face of such pressure, turned a smart marketing tactic into one its audience perceived as unscrupulous. Early-stage startups backed by venture capital face enormous pressure to grow quickly, and to prove that growth to their investors. The series of events that led Kite to engage in these practices started with a clever idea to market the company’s products and build its user base. One year after that article was published, 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.
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