I highly doubt the CFO has changed his viewpoint, and he's still in power over there. They only backtracked after the "insane" reaction. They anticipated some amount of pushback, but obviously hoped it would be smaller and they could move forward.
The root-cause screw-up here is delegating product decisions to F&A. A good CFO adds huge value to a company, but should not have final decision authority over product decisions. That is not the role of a CFO. Any company that makes it so is organizationally dysfunctional from the C-suite down.
Not sure I follow your logic there.
First of all, he's not right. As stated by the compliance officer in that thread, his plan would have violated the GDPR. It also would have violated existing contracts with enterprise customers.
Secondly, it's a scummy thing to do. just because you have the right to do something doesn't make it the right thing to do.
The world doesn't owe you a free Git issue tracker.
Honestly, who here is arguing that they can't implement some form of this? No one. Exactly no one. We don't like what it, and we're the consumer! It's not entitlement to pushback when a vendor changes their terms in a way you don't like.
I have no idea what point you're trying to make here.
> Their CFO showed that he has little regard for the privacy of their users.
Their users are companies, who can put on their big boy pants and decide what they think of Gitlab earnestly gathering usage information, not deep personal secrets, that it uses to help it improve its own product so that it can better serve the customer.
Throwing this all under the same category of "privacy" that one might use for private content -- the content of emails, the content of messages, copyrighted material, trade secrets, and the like -- as if this is a great moral issue, is just not a clear-minded way of operating.
It's strictly illegal under GDPR, the agreement is void as it contradicts the law (you cannot have terms and conditions superseding the law). The policy - "agree to tracking" must be explained and justified, consent must be given (affirmative action by customer/user).
Failing to do that and holding user's data as hostage would be compliance breach. GDPR fines are no joke and set forward to prevent abuse. (up to 20m euro or 4% global revenue) GitLab is no small business any more and a fine would outweight the 'tracking profits'
I don't know why you think that's ethically ok to hold user data hostage until they agree to give up more rights. It's borderline ransom.