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There is no good reason to put any form of telemetry in a non commercial open source project, ever. It is just user hostile behavior. Yes, even if it is opt out

There is no good reason to put any form of telemetry in a non commercial open source project, ever. It is just user hostile behavior. Yes, even if it is opt out. Good to see it got pushed back. Let's see for how long. Yes, people will say it "helps make the product better" but open source software, especially the GPL flavor, is for serving the user first and foremost, not making the developers job easier and I strongly doubt it really helps with the later. People these days are just horribly addicted to data gathering and believe quantitative methods for analyzing problems are the only right way. Probably for need to justify their job. Every good open source project is getting more than enough good qualitative feedback from the community that you should focus on. Improve the tool for the people that actually use it and are part of the community and not for some potential new users you hope to generate.

masklinn 5y ago
> There is no good reason to put any form of telemetry in a non commercial open source project, ever. That's simply not true, and there are absolutely reasons to put telemetry in projects, including non-commercial open-source projects e.g. tracing performance issues, tracing crashes and other bugs, collecting stats on feature usage (to know what to focus on or what to surface better) or workflows (to know what to improve support for, or what to better document if there are better ways to do things in the project). Getting useful feedback directly from users is difficult, and doubly so when you have no activity traces to go with it. The average Audacity user is never going to capture ETW traces when they have issues, and odds are they'll complain on audio tools forums rather than your own. I'm absolutely sensitive to the argument that telemetry is commonly misused and offline software adding telemetry is dodgy and icky, but pretending telemetry is necessarily useless and bad is just fals. > Every good open source project is getting more than enough good qualitative feedback from the community that you should focus on. 1. they really dont 2. especially for a project aimed mainly at non-dev users (which is what Audacity is), it's very unlikely that the feedback you get is relevant to the majority of your userbase
- cardanome 5y ago
  We disagree about the goals non-commercial open-source projects should have. I am focusing on serving the (established) users, you on things that might help the developers. I does not matter to me how much telemetry might help development at all. Even if all those things you listed were substantially helping improve development, nope I don't care. Software should serve the user and only the user. As a user I don't have any benefit from the use of telemetry. Sure maybe it might help fix issues in futures version for me but again it does not benefit me as a user of the current version of the software. I am well aware of the benefits of telemetry. If you develop commercial software it is absolutely critical to gather as much data as possible. But again the goal of open source non commercial projects should not be success at all cost. But to argue about the benefits of telemetry for arguments sake, nope raw data is not really that useful, turning it into actionable insights is still a job on its own. Software has been developed without telemetry for decades. There is lot's of way. From getting testers to actual user surveys and so on.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Making it easier to develop the software helps users, because then users get better software
    - cardanome 5y ago
      I already expected people to make that point that is why I wrote: > it does not benefit me as a user of the current version of the software. That is like the argument that ads are good for me because it allows companies to offer services for "free". Yeah, no thanks. Also it is not true with Audacity. The reason they are thinking about telemetry and the like is because they plan to do a massive redesign of the UI. I don't want this because I don't want to relearn how to use the software.
ghoward 5y ago
I have no idea why you are being down voted. Everything you said had borne true in many other cases.
valdiorn 5y ago
> There is no good reason to put any form of telemetry in a non commercial open source project, ever. It is just user hostile behavior. So tell me, why do people use telemetry at all? Why would it only be beneficial for commercial projects? That doesn't make any sense. I'm in the process of building an audio application myself. One of the things I worry about the most, when dealing with complex end-user software, is how do I as the developer discover bugs and issues my users are experiencing. Only a tiny fraction of users go our of their way to submit a bug report, let alone do it properly so that it's of any use to me. Good telemetry is key to improving my user's experience, and I'm putting a lot of effort into getting that stuff right.

masklinn 5y ago

> There is no good reason to put any form of telemetry in a non commercial open source project, ever. That's simply not true, and there are absolutely reasons to put telemetry in projects, including non-commercial open-source projects e.g. tracing performance issues, tracing crashes and other bugs, collecting stats on feature usage (to know what to focus on or what to surface better) or workflows (to know what to improve support for, or what to better document if there are better ways to do things in the project). Getting useful feedback directly from users is difficult, and doubly so when you have no activity traces to go with it. The average Audacity user is never going to capture ETW traces when they have issues, and odds are they'll complain on audio tools forums rather than your own. I'm absolutely sensitive to the argument that telemetry is commonly misused and offline software adding telemetry is dodgy and icky, but pretending telemetry is necessarily useless and bad is just fals. > Every good open source project is getting more than enough good qualitative feedback from the community that you should focus on. 1. they really dont 2. especially for a project aimed mainly at non-dev users (which is what Audacity is), it's very unlikely that the feedback you get is relevant to the majority of your userbase

cardanome 5y ago
We disagree about the goals non-commercial open-source projects should have. I am focusing on serving the (established) users, you on things that might help the developers. I does not matter to me how much telemetry might help development at all. Even if all those things you listed were substantially helping improve development, nope I don't care. Software should serve the user and only the user. As a user I don't have any benefit from the use of telemetry. Sure maybe it might help fix issues in futures version for me but again it does not benefit me as a user of the current version of the software. I am well aware of the benefits of telemetry. If you develop commercial software it is absolutely critical to gather as much data as possible. But again the goal of open source non commercial projects should not be success at all cost. But to argue about the benefits of telemetry for arguments sake, nope raw data is not really that useful, turning it into actionable insights is still a job on its own. Software has been developed without telemetry for decades. There is lot's of way. From getting testers to actual user surveys and so on.
- jefftk 5y ago
  Making it easier to develop the software helps users, because then users get better software
  - cardanome 5y ago
    I already expected people to make that point that is why I wrote: > it does not benefit me as a user of the current version of the software. That is like the argument that ads are good for me because it allows companies to offer services for "free". Yeah, no thanks. Also it is not true with Audacity. The reason they are thinking about telemetry and the like is because they plan to do a massive redesign of the UI. I don't want this because I don't want to relearn how to use the software.

ghoward 5y ago

I have no idea why you are being down voted. Everything you said had borne true in many other cases.

valdiorn 5y ago

> There is no good reason to put any form of telemetry in a non commercial open source project, ever. It is just user hostile behavior. So tell me, why do people use telemetry at all? Why would it only be beneficial for commercial projects? That doesn't make any sense. I'm in the process of building an audio application myself. One of the things I worry about the most, when dealing with complex end-user software, is how do I as the developer discover bugs and issues my users are experiencing. Only a tiny fraction of users go our of their way to submit a bug report, let alone do it properly so that it's of any use to me. Good telemetry is key to improving my user's experience, and I'm putting a lot of effort into getting that stuff right.