Transparent telemetry for open-source projects
Probably related to[0].To anybody complaining that this should be opt-in: opt-in telemetry doesn't work. The reason for this is that most people don't care, but they don't care either way. They don't disable it when prompted, nor would they enable it manually.The idea of telemetry is being able to prioritize the work that will be most widely useful. For this you need a good and balanced sample of your users. You don't really get any kind of sensible sample if you only do it opt-in. Additionally, this ship has long sailed, everybody does opt-out.What I do think however, is that it should very clearly notify the user of this, and give them an easy way to disable it. Like in OctoSQL[1] (disclaimer: which I'm the author of) which prompts you on first run and shows explicitly how to disable it.All things considered, this is an open source project, so you're free to maintain a fork without telemetry. The Go toolchain also uses the Google-hosted module proxy by default, which really is a bit like telemetry already.[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707583[1]: https://asciinema.org/a/eWQsyXQKi1fmithyTekAD5fWS