What am I looking at?
This is billed as a competitor to GitLab.
GitLab announced something about allowing some sort of telemetry on its site -- I didn't look into the details but its all over HN -- and people have complained that this might imply privacy violations.
So this alternative to GitLab got a bump in signups.
BTW As Drew said https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/... we're pumping the brakes on the telemetry changes.
So you revert (don't implement it)? Thx! Reverting it is the right decision (I hope that means "pumping the brakes").
Fundamentally they want to do telemetry it seems and are trying to figure out a hack to get people to accept it.
The fallacy of transparency: The more transparent you are, the more people think you're up to some shady shit. It's crazy.
Unless I'm misreading all this, it all looks like very standard telemetry, the same kind Github is doing.
In addition, it would apply to the enterprise deployments, which is bad because enterprises can’t allow telemetry for regulatory and security reasons.
They're also running on Google's cloud, which is mostly proprietary software. And I can tell you right now they use the most-definitely-closed-source Salesforce for a lot of stuff.
Do you think there's actually a significant amount of people who care about the license type of the internal tools of the companies they use?
If anything we're talking about frontend JS code that can be blocked by most adblockers/tracker blockers and thus will never touch your data, rather than the uncircumventable "your data is hosted on Google servers".
And the latter does raise alarm bells for a tiny minority, but why would frontend be worse in that aspect?
I do object to what Gitlab proposed, though, because I object to all telemetry that I don't specifically opt in to.
This isn't even sort of generally speaking true. Nearly EVERYONE on HN is aware to some extent how incredibly massively they're tracked by their ISP, by Google and Facebook, by their phone, by their phone's manufacturer, by their operating system, by the security cameras in all the shops they visit, by proxy through all their friends who aren't as privacy-conscious as they may be, etc.
I see very few people "hating" this. And I say it as someone who does hate it. Most people here are aware of it, and they all have the "tingly feeling", but most actually do choose to actively ignore it. "I don't have to deal with the idea that my phone is tracking me until there's public outrage abou tit" sort of thing.
And I'm not stubborn enough to put "gitlab wants to know how their product is being used" and "samsung wants to know what I'm watching and when" in the same bucket. And given how much of an improvement gitlab is over the status quo, I also know not to make enemies of my closest allies.
Not always, but often.
Granted, Gitlab wants telemetry in order to understand how Gitlab is being used. I'm sympathetic to their goal. But I'm also sympathetic to a sort of "NIMBY" response from users even if overall telemetry might improve the ecosystem for everyone. It's a sort of "tragedy of the commons" situation.