Sourcegraph have been sending unsolicited emails to my personal and work email addresses, and there's no way I signed up to any marketing on either of them. Very dodgy practices going on.
This is something we should be clearer and more upfront about. We collect emails for sales purposes from self-hosted Sourcegraph instances, but I agree that entering your email as part of the installation process doesn't mean you want us to email you directly. Going to fix this!
I engaged with them because I wanted to convince my management to pay for the damn thing instead of running some crappy hound instance. But you know how those things go, management didn't want to invest time in running the trial, nobody could just install this on their spare time because the very fact that we started this engagement with the trial program effectively turned fun into work and so nothing happened.
That's why opensource wins. Nobody is pushing it down your throat. You have a problem, you find a solution, you have the incentive to actually follow through your own drive and just use the best tool you found. Some companies have understood that and monetize on support and other things that happen long after you've been hooked to the free and open product.
Not sure sourcegraph can't do that as well, but I'm sure they have their good reason. Business is hard, I'm just an engineer.
I'm sharing this perspective just because, when you seel stuff to engineers, you should know how engineers think.
Yes, some products for engineers are sold to managers/execs instead; you can tell because engineers hate to use those, but they usually have no choice.
Sourcegraph is a pleasure to use. I'm regularly impressed by the snappiness of the UI. No wonder they're trying to sell it to engineers, it seems to have been indeed built for engineers!
But yeah, their reach out strategy can feel a bit invasive and sloppy.
Then they send you emails from a mailing list you didn’t sign up for:
Thanks for installing Sourcegraph
Hello- Mark here with the Sourcegraph Team!
I've shared a couple of links below to help you get started with Sourcegraph. https://docs.sourcegraph.com/getting-started https://docs.sourcegraph.com/integration
Out of curiosity, how did you hear about Sourcegraph, and is there a specific use case you're evaluating Sourcegraph for?
Best, Mark Muldez — DevTools Advocate
Sorry about this. How can I reach you privately? I need your email addresses so that we can remove it from our communication line moving forward.
PS: I work at Sourcegraph.