Overall: not safe for privacy or off-beat FOSS "In My Opinion"
It led me to https://docs.sourcegraph.com/dev/background-information/tele... and https://docs.sourcegraph.com/admin/pings. Neither of which mention opt-in or opt-out settings.
Upvoting you to raise awareness.
Will respond to the OP's concerns, which I agree are important, in a direct reply.
In general I reckon a lot of us in tech believe that our e-mail addresses "are out there anyway", and as such we start to think that it's reasonable to opt-in collection of personal information on the behalf of others (per the Critical Telemetry[1] section) without their full consent.
I don't personally think that's OK behaviour. Good products grow and are shared by worth-of-mouth and network effects over time when they're genuinely useful (as I think sourcegraph is), and I'd debate whether there's greater overall value in silently transmitting e-mail addresses (something that many people will only learn about at a later date) versus the potential privacy and reputation costs (such as could arise from conversations like this).
There may be some kind of argument that the information collection's required in order to send security and policy update notices; I'm uncertain about that: it's honest and useful to announce relevant information to the public when ready, but some consumers may wish to stay current on those themselves rather than be (unwittingly, at least) added to push-based messaging.
These would probably be considerations you'd have to reconcile not only with your own codebase and perspective, but also with your colleagues and peers, and I understand that friction - this is just honest feedback from my perspective.
[1] - https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/blob/66ce1f814946...
Sourcegraph CTO responded below in detail
> git is a networked system
Git has the potential to be part of a distributed system. It is not inherently networked. Most of Sourcegraph's features don't need any network connectivity at all, and most of the rest can get by with severely restricted access. Check out man unshare [1].
> nor build a version with telemetry ripped out
Of course that's possible! Telemetry is centralized in remarkably few places in the code, and nothing in the license prohibits that sort of thing. Replace the telemetry with no-ops and build it....
Yes, we do collect information from self-hosted instances of Sourcegraph. (Note to other readers: the blog post is talking about sourcegraph.com whereas what we are discussing here is running a standalone instance of Sourcegraph.) Here is what that info is:
(1) High-level "ping" data (https://docs.sourcegraph.com/admin/pings#critical-telemetry) that includes the email address you put in during installation, the version of Sourcegraph that's running, an aggregate count of users, total codebase size.
(2) Additional telemetry (https://docs.sourcegraph.com/admin/pings#other-telemetry) that includes aggregate usage, latencies, and product actions (e.g., which features are in use, progress through onboarding). This can be disabled in config: https://docs.sourcegraph.com/admin/config/site_config#disabl...
No information about individual user identities, behavior, repositories, or code is sent outside the Sourcegraph instance, unless you explicitly enable a feature (like code monitoring alerts) that does so.
We follow the open-core model and our enterprise-licensed code is also public. You can use Sourcegraph to explore the source code of Sourcegraph and see how telemetry is implemented: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/-....
We collect this data in order to sell our software to companies that use it. We have no plans to charge for Sourcegraph for open-source development, nor will we sell individual user data (which we don't collect).
We've made the decision to make (1) mandatory, because we haven't figured out a better way to ensure we have reasonable awareness of which companies are running Sourcegraph. We do try to keep this data as high-level/aggregate/non-invasive as possible, but I also understand that some might not want to send any data. For folks that fall into that camp, there are a number of other code search engines that are great: Livegrep, Zoekt, Hound, and OpenGrok are ones I'd recommend. If you think the feature set of Sourcegraph is cool and want to use it strictly for personal or open-source development while disabling all telemetry, feel free to reach out (beyang@sourcegraph.com) and I'd be happy to do what I can to make this happen.
Of course, if you don't want to run your own instance of Sourcegraph and are okay with using a cloud service, you can also add your repositories directly to sourcegraph.com, where they can be discovered and used by anyone from a single search box :)
If folks have any questions or feedback on the above, I'd love to hear it!