I wanted to try it, but the downloads page presents a popup asking for your name and email address, and you cannot dismiss it.
http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html
> Don't go overboard in trying to eliminate invalid email addresses with your regular expression. The reason is that you don't really know whether an address is valid until you try to send an email to it. And even that might not be enough.
To improve the "conversion", it would be a way better way to fix that link instead of forcing me to use the Web Inspector to remove a rude modal dialog…
But honestly, if a person won't share contact information in exchange for the fruits of thousands of hours of someone's labor then they don't have much of a need for it and the creators probably aren't missing them.
I'm pretty sure there is a web dev or user experience best practice about not spamming your users with "subscribe to us" and "like us on Facebook" dialogs immediately when they land on your page. And this one can't even be dismissed unless you subscribe!
Thankfully in this case I can just go build the thing myself but these kind of sign up walls without a way to opt out of them do annoy me.
I'm all for protecting privacy, but, Don't you think it is reasonable for a FOSS project/company to collect basic stats on their audience? They aren't even forcing you to give up your identity. Just an email address, which could be something that don't particularly identify you, while they get unique user stats. You could obviously mark them as Spam, if they do end up spamming you..
However, I should be allowed to opt out. I also don't consider my (work) email address to be meaningful data they can use to improve the quality of their software or gain an understanding of how it's being used. At best I can see them deduping download counts through it which can be done in other ways.
No. That is not free, that is paying for it with your privacy.