4 ms·

With FLOSS, the culture often looks down upon telemetry so there's an incentive not to include those because of user outcry (Audacity, ahem). Forking or patchin

With FLOSS, the culture often looks down upon telemetry so there's an incentive not to include those because of user outcry (Audacity, ahem). Forking or patching out the offending pieces of code is also possible (see Audacity again). Caddy v1 also came with telemetry, but it was trivial to rebuild it with the telemetry switched off. The best you can do with closed software like Windows is to apply a hack and hope it's not undone after an update.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
That's true, but still, the trend of embedding spyware in FLOSS is becoming normalized. On top of that, FLOSS spyware vs. proprietary spyware is a distinction that is useful only for software developers - a subset of "tech-savvy people". Until recently, tech-savvy people could just assume that FLOSS software is free from bullshit, and both use it and recommend it to non-tech-savvy people without checking. FLOSS or not, most software is still products, with a name and an owner. The openness could, in principle, enable a "network of slightly different forks" model of software evolution, but it didn't. There's universally a single canonical repo, with the "real" owners, and occasionally some niche forks. A fork takes over only when it can win the marketing game against the repo it forked from. So, each time an owner of the canonical repo decides to include telemetry in their project, their users who aren't software developers are screwed.