Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is the first language in my 23 years programming that reports my usage back to the language authors I suppose that means you haven't used any of: 1. nodejs, which reports your usage back to npm Inc with the exact same amount of detail (names of dependencies, ip of caller) (and stores much more, since it publishes 'downloads per month', etc) 2. rust, which does the same with crates.io 3. perl, which does that w…
If I download something from a server, of course that server knows what I downloaded. This is different. It’s a proxy in front of others repositories. They want info on downloads from GitHub, gitlab, and anywhere else you get code from. They (google) are a 3rd party to the download.
It's not all that different.
It's perfectly possible to use gems in ruby without ever using the rubygems server by setting every gem to be something like 'gem foo, :source = "https://github.com/foo/bar"'
However, people want to use this centralized repository in the ruby community because it allows for easily updating gems and for convenient caching.
The go proxy is not just a proxy. It also pre-parses out go.mod/go.sum to provide metadata faster and to provide security guarantees.
In a similar way to how centralized repositories are helpful in other languages, the go proxy adds actual legitimate features.
If you look at the public information on its development of this feature, all the motivations cited are about security, performance, and useful features, not information collection.
> This is different
There is a difference. Other repositories, like npm, require someone to opt-in to code being available via it (e.g. type `npm publish`, whether the publisher owns the package or not), while the go proxy default opts-in everyone that publishes a go package publicly and uses the newer go toolchain.
In practice, with how the npm/rubygems/etc communities work, everyone does opt-in if they wish their code to be publicly used, so the difference doesn't seem meaningful to me.
Other than that, the difference seems vanishingly small. In both cases, a 3rd party exists that serves downloads, and it exists to provide performance and discoverability benefits (with the go proxy also does due to supporting version-related operations), and in some cases security benefits.