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I think maybe even making telemetry mandatory with an open license, and customizable with a support license might be a sustainable way to run an open source com

I think maybe even making telemetry mandatory with an open license, and customizable with a support license might be a sustainable way to run an open source company. For many open source project (anything with an attached business model), either telemetry or tight communication around usage patterns will be necessary to inform development. The latter of those two options consumes business resources.

bioemerl 4y ago
Mandatory with an open license might shoot yourself in the foot when people fork your code. For me, the harshest you can go is to have telemetry and not prompt for the setting on start with the user opted in by default. Ideally, you ask on first load, and that's what I'd probably aim for. You can't ever try to force people to do anything in open source. They'll run right by you and make it do what they want it to do with or without you. I'd even imagine paying customers are broadly more happy with telemetry than open source ones. And their needs more important anyways.
yencabulator 4y ago
> making telemetry mandatory with an open license If it's mandatory to run the code that does telemetrics, it's not a very open license.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Just because Linux is open source doesn't mean you can't have both Fedora and Red Hat (an enterprise version built on the same codebase) I don't think any closed source goes into Red Hat, it's just the patch delivery pipelines, package repositories, etc that require a license. And support of course. Same with any distributed system whose core contributors could gain insight from telemetry. All the components are open source, but they can package it all up and make it available under different terms. If there's a community version and an enterprise version, you can then make telemetry required in the community version. If people don't like it, they can pull the package apart and put it back together however they want, or they can pay for an enterprise license.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    You can make submitting telemetrics a condition of some other agreement, such as copyright license on the Red Hat name, or a B2B support contract. That, however, is pretty far removed from what's discussed here; if the software license itself makes telemetrics "mandatory", then it's no longer an open license.
    - pcthrowaway 4y ago
      I don't think I made myself clear. The company ships one product which is a community edition of a bundle of open source software. That version has telemetry enabled and can't be disabled. Users who want to patch the code manually can of course disable it, just like they can disable the Ad lens in Ubuntu if they want to build it themselves, and those users will be off the beaten path and likely to run into issues that aren't easy to find paved solutions for. They also offer an enterprise edition with a support license, on which telemetry is enabled by default, but can also be disabled.
      - yencabulator 4y ago
        > bundle of open source software. That version has telemetry enabled and can't be disabled. I'd recommend saying "and cannot be configured off without code changes", or something. Of course it can be disabled, if it's open source. Go compiler without telemetrics opt-out would fragment the community even harder than Go compiler with telemetrics default on. While your scenario is, of course, possible, it's not very relevant to the Go compiler. As for your original "might be a sustainable way to run an open source company", if the primary feature one gets buy paying is "easy to turn off telemetrics", that just doesn't sound like enough value.
        pcthrowaway 4y ago
        Well I mean. In a lot of the popular Linux distributions you kind of get what the distro comes with. Can you configure openSUSE to use apt instead of zypper? I mean, sure, probably, it's open source. Is it going to be straightforward? I don't know. I suspect it's going to be harder than it's worth, and you might need to rebuild the operating system image to change the directory layout to work with apt's assumptions or something. So in practice, even though these things are all open source, people who bundle complex software lay down the paths that 99.9% of people will take. I wasn't proposing "disabling telemetry" as the primary business proposition. Instead I was suggesting that open-source companies spend a lot of time dealing with issues from people who use the open-source software in unanticipated ways. If "the beaten path" for using the software without support includes telemetry, they get value from that. If people want to use the software without telemetry, then they're paying for a support license, so the issues they run into which the supporting company has no telemetric insight into are at least better aligned with their support resource allocation.

bioemerl 4y ago

Mandatory with an open license might shoot yourself in the foot when people fork your code. For me, the harshest you can go is to have telemetry and not prompt for the setting on start with the user opted in by default. Ideally, you ask on first load, and that's what I'd probably aim for. You can't ever try to force people to do anything in open source. They'll run right by you and make it do what they want it to do with or without you. I'd even imagine paying customers are broadly more happy with telemetry than open source ones. And their needs more important anyways.

yencabulator 4y ago

> making telemetry mandatory with an open license If it's mandatory to run the code that does telemetrics, it's not a very open license.

pcthrowaway 4y ago
Just because Linux is open source doesn't mean you can't have both Fedora and Red Hat (an enterprise version built on the same codebase) I don't think any closed source goes into Red Hat, it's just the patch delivery pipelines, package repositories, etc that require a license. And support of course. Same with any distributed system whose core contributors could gain insight from telemetry. All the components are open source, but they can package it all up and make it available under different terms. If there's a community version and an enterprise version, you can then make telemetry required in the community version. If people don't like it, they can pull the package apart and put it back together however they want, or they can pay for an enterprise license.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  You can make submitting telemetrics a condition of some other agreement, such as copyright license on the Red Hat name, or a B2B support contract. That, however, is pretty far removed from what's discussed here; if the software license itself makes telemetrics "mandatory", then it's no longer an open license.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    I don't think I made myself clear. The company ships one product which is a community edition of a bundle of open source software. That version has telemetry enabled and can't be disabled. Users who want to patch the code manually can of course disable it, just like they can disable the Ad lens in Ubuntu if they want to build it themselves, and those users will be off the beaten path and likely to run into issues that aren't easy to find paved solutions for. They also offer an enterprise edition with a support license, on which telemetry is enabled by default, but can also be disabled.
    - yencabulator 4y ago
      > bundle of open source software. That version has telemetry enabled and can't be disabled. I'd recommend saying "and cannot be configured off without code changes", or something. Of course it can be disabled, if it's open source. Go compiler without telemetrics opt-out would fragment the community even harder than Go compiler with telemetrics default on. While your scenario is, of course, possible, it's not very relevant to the Go compiler. As for your original "might be a sustainable way to run an open source company", if the primary feature one gets buy paying is "easy to turn off telemetrics", that just doesn't sound like enough value.
      - pcthrowaway 4y ago
        Well I mean. In a lot of the popular Linux distributions you kind of get what the distro comes with. Can you configure openSUSE to use apt instead of zypper? I mean, sure, probably, it's open source. Is it going to be straightforward? I don't know. I suspect it's going to be harder than it's worth, and you might need to rebuild the operating system image to change the directory layout to work with apt's assumptions or something. So in practice, even though these things are all open source, people who bundle complex software lay down the paths that 99.9% of people will take. I wasn't proposing "disabling telemetry" as the primary business proposition. Instead I was suggesting that open-source companies spend a lot of time dealing with issues from people who use the open-source software in unanticipated ways. If "the beaten path" for using the software without support includes telemetry, they get value from that. If people want to use the software without telemetry, then they're paying for a support license, so the issues they run into which the supporting company has no telemetric insight into are at least better aligned with their support resource allocation.