Reaction to OpenAI's acquisition of Cline

In response to OpenAI's acquisition of the Cline team, Kilo Code, a project forked from Cline and Roo Code, has announced that it will make its backend source code available starting February 6th. This strategic decision aims to provide a viable open-source alternative for those developing programming tools that utilize local models.

Kilo Code offers a VS Code extension, a JetBrains plugin, and a CLI, all released under the Apache 2.0 license (open source). Their gateway supports over 500 models, including Qwen, DeepSeek, and Mistral.

Incentives for contributors

To encourage participation and development of the platform, Kilo Code is offering $100 credits to anyone who contributed to Cline and $150 for each merged pull request in February. The goal is to attract developers interested in continuing to build on an open codebase, rather than witnessing the disappearance of another project within a closed ecosystem.

Kilo Code's initiative highlights the importance of alternatives in the agentic development space, capable of working with local and open weight models. The concern is that the most valuable tools will end up being controlled by large research labs.