“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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