201–210 of 329 posts
I'm the maintainer who added this. I apologise for the poor communication. I would have responded sooner but I've been on a plane for the last 10 hours. I'd hoped the documentation would have made clear our reasons for doing this but I feel the discomfort so since getting off my flight I've opened and merged three PRs ( https://github.com/Homebrew/install/pull/42 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/143 https://gith…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember when everyone switched to Homebrew because Fink/macports were "antiquated", a.k.a. not written in Ruby? It was nice back then. Packages didn't install themselves in /usr/local.
> Remember when everyone switched to Homebrew because Fink/macports were "antiquated", a.k.a. not written in Ruby? Yes, I must admit I chose the word "antiquated" quite intentionally, as Homebrew seems to get so much attention (for now) because it's written in Ruby and the website ( http://brew.sh/ ) is shiny, rather than technical merits. > It was nice back then. Packages didn't install themselves in /usr/local. You…
/nix/store? Really? You can't just make up new root level directories. That's so wrong.
They also used similar Windows error reporting to monitor what software/hardware users have.
Not that anyone should be snooping on what users do without opt-in permission, but even if we believed that Google "anonymize" it, there are still concerns.
More simply, there's just no reason for you to know what I do on my own computer. It's none of your business and I don't need a reason.
I'm the maintainer who added this. I apologise for the poor communication. I would have responded sooner but I've been on a plane for the last 10 hours. I'd hoped the documentation would have made clear our reasons for doing this but I feel the discomfort so since getting off my flight I've opened and merged three PRs ( https://github.com/Homebrew/install/pull/42 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/143 https://gith…
I'm the maintainer who added this. I apologise for the poor communication. I would have responded sooner but I've been on a plane for the last 10 hours. I'd hoped the documentation would have made clear our reasons for doing this but I feel the discomfort so since getting off my flight I've opened and merged three PRs ( https://github.com/Homebrew/install/pull/42 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/143 https://gith…
I'd encourage you to keep the opt-out setting as-is. It clearly brings value to the development team, you're communicating it to users, and Homebrew users who aren't comfortable with opt-out can a) disable analytics or b) not use Homebrew. Switching to opt-in is going to greatly diminish the dataset you'd have for making improvements (selection bias). The Homebrew developers' time is valuable, versus a subset of user…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. Google Analytics is a network of companies that has agreed to privately collection information about users without their permission or even knowledge. It is malware that should not be included in Homebrew. The only ethical decision we can make as developers is not to use it.
Indeed! Feel free to demand a refund or refer to the contract you signed... Nobody's forcing anyone to use it.
For example: "Linux has issues" "It's free. Nobody's forcing you to use it."
or
"FreeBSD has issues.." "It's Free. Nobody's forcing you to use it."
or
"I had a hard time installing Gentoo because of bad documentation. Somebody should fix that. No, seriously, metaland." "It's Free. Nobody's forcing you to use it."
I'm all for "beggars can't be choosers", but when there's nothing else to choose, of course people are going to complain.
I'm the maintainer who added this. I apologise for the poor communication. I would have responded sooner but I've been on a plane for the last 10 hours. I'd hoped the documentation would have made clear our reasons for doing this but I feel the discomfort so since getting off my flight I've opened and merged three PRs ( https://github.com/Homebrew/install/pull/42 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/143 https://gith…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd encourage you to keep the opt-out setting as-is. It clearly brings value to the development team, you're communicating it to users, and Homebrew users who aren't comfortable with opt-out can a) disable analytics or b) not use Homebrew. Switching to opt-in is going to greatly diminish the dataset you'd have for making improvements (selection bias). The Homebrew developers' time is valuable, versus a subset of user…
Nobody is "making demands"
It's nice to know how and where your software is being used, but in many environments call-home functionality and auto-update functionality are non-starters.
Any non-user initiated network activity should be explicitly agreed to and available to be easily stripped.
We can and should do a better job with open source software than closed source would-be competition. Even if you aren't a privacy advocate, privacy is a priority of a significant amount of the technical community. It's significant enough that it should be addressed as a forethought to features like this, not an afterthought.
Things like this pop up as negative news entries that people gloss over. The guy who makes the snap decision "don't use brew, it phones home" today could be a CTO who never had that opinion changed three years from now.