It's concerning to me that people are drawing parallels to Cambridge Analytica over this. It shows the deep, deep misunderstanding among not just lay people, but people who should really know better, about what Cambridge Analytica and Facebook actually did.
Put a Fork in Caddy; It's Done
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: Put a Fork in Caddy; It's Done
#22Allow me to spend a few words shooting the messenger: This blog post comes across as petulant whining with a side order of personal attack. The author needs someone to buy them a drink and explain that Caddy is just not that into them and there are plenty of fish in the sea.
Having said that, I have no idea why the makers of Caddy think that telemetry is a good idea. None of the examples given on the Caddy site make any sense to me except for maybe reporting crashes. Who cares about the depth of certificate chains? What value does it bring?
Re: Put a Fork in Caddy; It's Done
#23The original announcement is here: https://caddyserver.com/blog/caddy-0_11-telemetry And forum discussion here: https://caddy.community/t/caddy-0-11-will-have-telemetry-dis... I thought some of the ideas in the "middle ground" section discussing opt-in versus opt-out being the default depending on how you obtained the software were sort of interesting, hadn't heard that compromise suggested before.
Reading that it really feels like he only posed the question for discussion so that he can say that he got input. It doesn't seem like the feedback is going to sway him an inch.
I'm really not a fan of default telemetry (and other aspects of Caddy), but some of the feedback in that thread is really bad and I can totally understand mholts reactions to it. Which is a shame, since it risks to drown out more detailed comments.
Re: Put a Fork in Caddy; It's Done
#24> This is no longer just a conversation on privacy; this is a hostage situation.
Give me a break. I'm tired of this type of drama and FUD coming up through sensationalized posts like this. It's open source -- there's no hostage situation.
I stopped reading at that whiney BS.
Matt is looking to collect anonymized data so that he knows how his product is being used and how it can be improved -- which must be a tough situation, considering most SaaS companies can throw whatever trackers they want up into their apps and be done with it -- on-prem software is a little different when it comes to usage statistics, etc., and I think this is acceptable.
You can grep this to see all of the data they're collecting,
go telemetry.
Re: Put a Fork in Caddy; It's Done
#25The original announcement is here: https://caddyserver.com/blog/caddy-0_11-telemetry And forum discussion here: https://caddy.community/t/caddy-0-11-will-have-telemetry-dis... I thought some of the ideas in the "middle ground" section discussing opt-in versus opt-out being the default depending on how you obtained the software were sort of interesting, hadn't heard that compromise suggested before.
Skimming through that discussion, it seems like the developer is also somewhat naively optimistic and possibly underinformed regarding how much of his own and his customers/users' effort will be required to comply with the GDPR while gathering this data.
A server-installation data is not data about a particular user. It’s a information about a piece of running software.
GDPR does not regulate information you can store about software components. It merely ensures that companies can only store information about people which the person has given explicit and implicit consent for, and that they can account for this consent.
Log-data from a running service disconnected from any identifiable personal data is in no way covered by GDPR.
Re: Put a Fork in Caddy; It's Done
#26Hey everyone -- Matt here.
Not quite sure why this is news; we've been discussing telemetry for a long[1] time[2].
I haven't actually watched the video because I've been really busy finishing my last semester of graduate school and switching research labs to start my masters thesis this week.
Several of us in the research community have agreed that telemetry can be a net good for the Web. Similar to how Firefox, the privacy-focused browser, has telemetry on by default to help improve the Web.
A huge thanks to everyone who contributes to Caddy and makes it -- in my opinion -- one of the best, easiest-to-use web servers around. We have over 200 contributors and it is amazing what the open source community has pulled together, despite the growing pains we faced last year [3].
I hope you love using Caddy, and if you don't, you don't have to use it.
[1]: https://caddy.community/t/caddy-0-11-will-have-telemetry-dis...
[2]: https://caddy.community/t/the-caddy-telemetry-project/3224?u...
[3]: https://caddy.community/t/the-realities-of-being-a-foss-main...
Re: Put a Fork in Caddy; It's Done
#27What a loveley sidecar ad-hominem. I'm sure his religious beliefs had a major impact on the telemetry issue.
It seems weird to be linking to the developer's (social media? church?) profile in an attempt to illustrate a conflict in values or imply hypocrisy. That is potentially out of line to me as the Caddy site itself doesn't link to this profile or (that I could find) reference it in any form.
I don't think it is attacking his religion, but the criticism of the project direction could be made without that.
Re: Put a Fork in Caddy; It's Done
#28I can't reach the site to read the post, but it seems that Caddy has been plagued with controvosy/drama as they tried to monetise their project - as past discussion here shows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15237923 It's a nice-looking project, and the integrated Let's Encrypt is great for non-sophisticated users, but the user-base must be suffering.
I'm personally happy Matt is charging for his work. More open-source devs should charge for commercial use a la Sidekiq, ngrok, and Caddy.
Free OSS is great, but for these types of tools, so is paid OSS.
There's a large pool of small, useful dev tools that could be making money instead of begging for it. And I'm glad Matt is a part of the much smaller group that makes money.
Re: Put a Fork in Caddy; It's Done
#29It's amazing the lack of gratefulness some people have for open source devs. Matt Holt, which I don't know nor have ever met, has spend a tremendous amount of time developing Caddy and making it available for free. It's creating a lot of value, regardless of what you think of recent telemetry announcements. And still, apparently, some people will use the slightest disagreement to say that the whole project is garbage…
Being able to fork in case of disagreements is a feature of open source, not a bug. Some of these forks get re-merged a few years later (see ffmpeg), others don't, but this is not bad at all. The ideal solution would be to build Caddy with flags that disable telemetry, just like Firefox is built for Debian.
Apache httpd is itself a (patchy) fork of NCSA httpd.
Re: Put a Fork in Caddy; It's Done
#30I can't reach the site to read the post, but it seems that Caddy has been plagued with controvosy/drama as they tried to monetise their project - as past discussion here shows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15237923 It's a nice-looking project, and the integrated Let's Encrypt is great for non-sophisticated users, but the user-base must be suffering.
I'm personally happy Matt is charging for his work. More open-source devs should charge for commercial use a la Sidekiq, ngrok, and Caddy. Free OSS is great, but for these types of tools, so is paid OSS. There's a large pool of small, useful dev tools that could be making money instead of begging for it. And I'm glad Matt is a part of the much smaller group that makes money.
I have no qualms about commercial services either, it's just a very different model here compared to nginx (which is about the closest comparison project I can think of).