Cline Acqui-Hired by OpenAI: What Happens When Open Source Gets Acquired

Was Cline Just Acqui-Hired by OpenAI?

TLDR: Reading the tea leaves of Tech Twitter and LinkedIn suggests OpenAI has acqui-hired the Cline team into Codex. Kilo is responding by making their backend source-available and offering credits to Cline contributors to keep the open-source coding agent community alive.

Summary:

This is the pattern we've seen play out countless times in open source, and it's happening again. Cline, the VS Code extension that proved powerful coding agents could live directly in the IDE, appears to have been acqui-hired by OpenAI. The team members are now reportedly on the Codex team. Congratulations to them - very few startups ever see any kind of exit, and you don't get this opportunity unless you build something genuinely valuable.

But let's be honest about what usually follows these acquisitions. "Open" survives as a word, but the reality changes. Pull requests slow down. Third-party contributors vanish. Decisions move behind closed doors. The community that built the project becomes an audience watching from the outside. It's not malicious - it's just the natural gravitational pull of corporate ownership.

Kilo is positioning itself as the alternative, and they're backing it up with concrete commitments. Their VS Code extension, JetBrains plugin, and CLI are already Apache 2.0 - that license is irrevocable. Even if Kilo the company disappears tomorrow, that code stays open forever. By February 6, 2026, they're making their Kilo Gateway and Cloud backend source-available as well: the orchestration layer, cloud tools, sessions - all of it will be proprietary but visible for reading, auditing, and learning from.

The company's pedigree adds credibility here. Sid Sijbrandij, who co-founded Kilo, kept GitLab open for over 11 years and took it public as an open-core company. He co-founded Open Core Ventures specifically to prove that open core can scale into a real business without closing doors on contributors.

For teams and architects evaluating coding agent tools, this is a useful reminder to think carefully about lock-in and sustainability. Tools built on open-source foundations can disappear into corporate black boxes. The Apache 2.0 license matters because it's irrevocable - even if the company pivots or gets acquired, your ability to use, fork, and build on the code remains protected. Source-available backends are a middle ground that provides transparency and auditability even when the code isn't fully open.

Kilo is also putting money where their mouth is: $100 in credits for every Cline contributor, $150 for every PR merged to Kilo in February, and they're flying up to 5 contributors to Amsterdam for an in-person hackathon. Whether this succeeds in capturing the Cline community remains to be seen, but the investment is real.

Key takeaways:

• Cline's team appears to have joined OpenAI's Codex team in what looks like an acqui-hire
• The familiar pattern: open source project gains traction, gets acquired, community becomes audience
• Apache 2.0 licensing provides irrevocable protection - code stays open regardless of corporate changes
• Source-available backends offer transparency without full open-source licensing

Tradeoffs:

• Acqui-hires provide excellent outcomes for founders but sacrifice community ownership and direction
• Open-core models enable sustainable business but sacrifice full community control over roadmap
• Source-available code provides transparency but sacrifices the ability to freely fork and compete

Link: Was Cline just acqui-hired by OpenAI?