Was Cline just acqui-hired by OpenAI?
Kilo is doubling down on staying open
In reading the tea leaves of Tech Twitter and LinkedIn, it looks like OpenAI may have acqui-hired the Cline team. It’s not currently clear what that means for the future of Cline as a project, as Cline’s team members are now on the Codex team.
First: Thank you, Cline Contributors
If you used Cline, contributed code, opened issues, reviewed PRs, or pushed the project forward in any way—thank you. You proved to people that powerful coding agents can live in the IDE. You helped invent a new category.
A lot of what exists today, including Kilo Code, builds directly on your work.
Let’s talk about what just happened.
Firstly, if we’re right, congrats to the Cline team. Very few startups ever see a good outcome. And you don’t have this kind of opportunity unless you build something real and valuable.
This is a familiar pattern in our industry:
Open source contributors create and prove a company
The project gains traction
The company gets acquired (or acqui-hired)
What comes next is…uncertain.
After events like this, “open” usually survives merely as a word. PRs slow down. Third-party contributors vanish. Decisions are made behind closed doors. The community that built the project becomes an audience.
Kilo will stay open, and we’re backing that up with action - we’re making our backend source available.
Kilo is doubling down on staying open
I spent years in data, building tools and teams on top of open source infrastructure. I’ve seen what happens when the tools you depend on get acquired, relicensed, or get quietly locked down.
That’s why joining Sid to build Kilo was a no-brainer for me. He kept GitLab open for over 11 years, not as a marketing play, but because he genuinely believes that’s the way to build software that lasts. He co-founded Open Core Ventures and spent years proving that open core can scale into a real business without closing the doors on contributors. I watched GitLab go public as an open core company. It can be done.
Kilo runs on the same principle. And now we’re doubling down on it:
Our VS Code extension, JetBrains plugin, and CLI are already Apache 2.0—that license is irrevocable. Whatever happens to Kilo, the company, that code stays open. Forever. That’s not a promise we can break even if we wanted to.
Now we’re going further.
By February 6, 2026, our Kilo Gateway and Cloud backend will be source available. The orchestration layer, cloud tools, sessions... all of it will be proprietary but open for you to read, audit, learn from, and contribute to. To make abuse harder, we’re keeping our abuse protection code private, but everything else ships visible.
Expect many new publicly available a lot of repos from us under Kilo-Org on GitHub in the near future.
How we’ll support Cline contributors
We don’t want this to be just talk. We’re excited for the Kilo Community to become the home of open-source agentic engineering, and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to build here. Not only that, but we also intend to make sure that your contributions aren’t just reviewed but credited, promoted, and celebrated.
To that end, there are a few ways we’re planning to help Cline contributors continue building, experimenting with, and shipping open source:
Every Cline contributor will receive $100 in Kilo credits*.
We will give you $100 to build with Kilo via the Kilo Gateway. You can use that balance to get access to SOTA models like the latest versions Opus/Gemini/GPT or open-weight models like MiniMaxZ.AI/GLM/Kimi.
If you’ve created a merged PR to Cline in the past 2 years, get in touch at oss@kilo.ai and we’ll add $100 to your Kilo account right away.
$150 in Kilo credits for every PR merged to Kilo in February
For every PR you get merged into Kilo during February, we’ll add $150 in credits to your account. Use it to run Opus, Gemini, GPT, or any of the 500+ models available through the Kilo Gateway. No limits on how many PRs - if you merge five, that’s $750. We’re serious about rewarding the people who help make Kilo better.
We’ll make you a Champion
We’re launching our Kilo Champion program - where we’ll celebrate star contributors with a combination of Kilo swag, credits, and special roles in our Community. Check out the program here - and if you’ve contributed to Cline, we’ll fast-track you into the program and make sure you have everything you need to build.
We’ll fly you out to Amsterdam
We’ll fly up to 5 contributors to Amsterdam (all expenses paid) for an in-person speedrun. Our entire team will be there for our Quarterly Focus Week, and we’ll support you in every possible way. Let’s build the best open source agentic engineering platform together. If you’ve made any significant contributions to Kilo, get in touch via LinkedIn or oss@kilo.ai
How we’ll support Cline users
Kilo started as a superset of Cline and Roo Code. If you’ve used Cline, you’ll feel right at home in Kilo.
To make your transition even easier, we’ve created a few resources for you:
We’ll continue to build resources like these because your experience matters to us, and we want your transition to feel less like starting over and more like coming home.
Building an Open Source future
Open, editor-first coding agents, like all open source projects, thrive when people actively build, maintain, and push them forward. If you’ve contributed to Cline, you’ve already had a tremendous impact on building an open source future.
I’m inviting you to contribute to Kilo to carry that work forward and keep expanding what’s possible with open source editor-native agents.
AI is too transformational to be locked inside walled gardens — the future should be open, transparent, and shaped by the community.
Let’s build the future together.