You are absolutely passing judgement when you equate the blowback against Kite with extrajudicial (and mostly racist) murder. That you doubled down in your flagged comment instead of acknowledging the (being charitable) hyperbole raises questions about your judgement. No offense.

That said, by deed and by words (per their apology) they executed on an "ends justify the means" business model. They wanted more business, they came up with the idea of buying open source projects, took a stab at integrating their functionality with the projects, and people didn't like it.

Don't tell me the people don't have a right to choose how they respond to Kite, business reputation is an actual thing and you can't browbeat people into ignoring their feelings on the issue.

Regardless, whether their strategy was malicious and/or shady is a value judgement best left to the individual, and there appear to be a variety of opinions on the matter. Note that @abe33 does not list Kite as an employer, so it would appear he's hedging his bet on how awesome this idea is.

'equate the blowback against Kite with extrajudicial (and mostly racist) murder'

I didn't say anything about race anywhere. way to read between the lines again and attempt to make my original comment look WAY more inflammatory than it actually was.

I was more equating it to large groups of people getting up-in-arms and angry without actually taking a step back and looking at the whole situation.

To say that is a lynch-mob mentality is 100% accurate.

> I didn't say anything about race anywhere

"lynch" is a racially-coded word in 2017. Google "lynch racially coded" and check the first few hits. That's the mine you unintentionally stepped on here.

I forgot I lived in 2017, where _literally_ anything can be taken out of context and made into a race issue.

Which is exactly what you did by comparing the Kite response to lynching.