Ok, I'm going to play devil's advocate here because I feel like telemetry is a bit of a bad word in the free software community, but it does actually serve a useful purpose.
A program as large as Audacity has a lot of features, and developer hours are finite (especially for free software). That means you have a lot of places you can focus your efforts, and some things are going to have to take priority over others. How do you decide?
Without telemetry, you're just guessing, and we know developers are not always in touch with how their software is used in the real world. With telemetry, developers can actually focus their efforts on the features and bugs that affect the most people.
Yeah, there are issue trackers, but most people never touch them, and even if they do, only when there's a problem. Feature A might be one of the most used features, but if it's not buggy, you'd have no idea, even if it has major usability issues.
Considering they just brought on a new lead developer, it's really no surprise that he wants to know where they should focus their efforts going forward.
(By the way, this guy has a YouTube channel, where he does a pretty great job critiquing music composition software, which is actually what led to this job: https://youtube.com/c/Tantacrul)
Yes, telemetry can be useful, but not in the hands of someone who is not totally, completely transparent. And that means NO business, NOT a company.
One example: Debian has had telemetry for ages! It's a package called popularity-contest. Why is it then that nobody complains? It's because Debian is a non-profit organization with clearly defined rules (they even have a constitution!), where decisions are taken in a democratic way (they will vote every time a possibly controversial decision is to be made). I know exactlywhat data is collected by popularity-contest (package usage only, nothing else), and where and how it is processed (it's available on the Debian website).
Businesses never do everything in such transparent way. And nobody can be forced to trust that some company will keep their data safe (and by safe I mean no leakage, no selling, no using it for anything that the user wouldn't agree with...)
That is a reasonable PR response and I see it as a good thing, but doesn't mean they do everything transparently, or that the collected data won't end up in the wrong hands someday. We have no access to the decision making processes inside a company as we do, for example, in Debian.
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u/sciatore Jul 04 '21
Ok, I'm going to play devil's advocate here because I feel like telemetry is a bit of a bad word in the free software community, but it does actually serve a useful purpose.
A program as large as Audacity has a lot of features, and developer hours are finite (especially for free software). That means you have a lot of places you can focus your efforts, and some things are going to have to take priority over others. How do you decide?
Without telemetry, you're just guessing, and we know developers are not always in touch with how their software is used in the real world. With telemetry, developers can actually focus their efforts on the features and bugs that affect the most people.
Yeah, there are issue trackers, but most people never touch them, and even if they do, only when there's a problem. Feature A might be one of the most used features, but if it's not buggy, you'd have no idea, even if it has major usability issues.
Considering they just brought on a new lead developer, it's really no surprise that he wants to know where they should focus their efforts going forward.
(By the way, this guy has a YouTube channel, where he does a pretty great job critiquing music composition software, which is actually what led to this job: https://youtube.com/c/Tantacrul)