Homebrew's use of analytics still bothers me; specifically, making data public like this. It was supposed to only be used for development efforts, not showing off top-1000 lists. Also, I guess this following statement is - taking the charitable option - out of date. > Homebrew's analytics are accessible to Homebrew's current maintainers. https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.... Yeah, I know, my…
I wasn't part of the creation of that particular page, but one thing we (the maintainers) commonly find ourselves doing is publicly referencing install statistics as justification for removing an unused formula or taking extra care during a version bump. Having public statistics for the top 1000 most popular packages makes those considerations a little bit more transparent.
Edit: I've created a PR to fix the language: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/3120