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by fock 1962 days ago
Like a fellow poster said, that's easily manipulated, especially if the marketing of a VC-funded startup jumps on the train. My concern with this would be that you've arguably turned a nice free (as in freedom!), open-source-tool into a vehicle to push more or less proprietary and user-tracking code onto naive, unknowing users (though I guess that is not too uncommon in the anaconda-ecosystem you target - spack user and guix/nix-sympathiser here). Why make it a nagscreen (not sure about the extent of that), if you could just make it an option or a status message.

For me you're now just competing with every proprietary python IDE, which basically drops you of my list of tools to use or recommend (one can also use free PyCharm or VSCode or RStudio then, where you know, what you get...)

1 comments

> My concern with this would be that you've arguably turned a nice free (as in freedom!), open-source-tool into a vehicle to push more or less proprietary and user-tracking code onto naive, unknowing users

I respectfully disagree. First, the decision was not only mine, but from our team and community (see my post just above yours). Second, you are not losing any freedom by simply dismissing our message to take a look at Kite. And third, Kite doesn't track our users.

> Why make it a nagscreen (not sure about the extent of that), if you could just make it an option or a status message.

This is quite common in Hacker News: you're criticizing us without knowing how this works. We only show a message about Kite once. Then we show another message in the editor *if* our code completion machinery can't provide completions but Kite does. Both can be dismissed with a single click, that's it. These features are annoying for the user that started this thread because their settings are reset every day.

> For me you're now just competing with every proprietary python IDE

We are effectively competing with other editors and IDEs, with or without Kite. If giving the chance to (not forcing) our users to have better code completions makes us more competitive, I'm all for it.