This situation seems to have the best and worst of open-source. Best, in that the license of the projects allowed them to be forked without too much effort. Worst, in that it shows how easy it is for a project to be subverted once the maintainers are bought (in this case, given a job). It also remains to be seen if the average Atom user will see the difference between the Kite-branded (and, currently, more popular) and the forked versions of these plugins.

Besides the open source issues, this tactic seems to reveal a massive desperation by the Kite folks. There is no way they couldn't have seen how negative this was going to look once people found out. Their ability to attract new users through word-of-mouth and organic advertising must have plateaued. Sneaking their service into a well-used plugin would have given them a boost in users, maybe enough to attract a new round of funding, but they must have known it would cause this kind of bad blood. Especially based on their past reception on HN, which was highly upvoted but in which they never convincingly answered the concerns about uploading users' source code to the cloud:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497111

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13977982

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4erqgq/kite_pr...