61–70 of 87 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A company's "need" to collect metrics is their problem, not mine. And your need to run an OS on your computer is your problem, not theirs. What do you do if everyone on the sell side of the market uses telemetry? Just stop using computers?
That's the beauty of foss, you can just remove the offensive bits.
Why not just track downloads from the mirrors? If you post a new version of package for fedora 29, just track how many downloads of that specific file are made. Write some scripts for log processing and require official mirrors to submit the logs to give you the package counts. That way user info never makes it past the mirror (which has their IP anyways) and you don't need anything complex like UUIDs, playing tricks…
Why not just track downloads from the mirrors? If you post a new version of package for fedora 29, just track how many downloads of that specific file are made. Write some scripts for log processing and require official mirrors to submit the logs to give you the package counts. That way user info never makes it past the mirror (which has their IP anyways) and you don't need anything complex like UUIDs, playing tricks…
"Essentially, users would need to trust that the project isn't doing the tracking because it says it isn't." The cynic in me is recalling that red hat just got bought by IBM and IBM is in the news for tracking people in a weather app in a sneaky way I don't know any better though, maybe fedora is quite independent of red hat/IBM and its 100% legit to trust their promises. I'm not sure how it works tbh Edit: added quo…
This is a nitpick, but Red Hat did not get bought by IBM. What happened was IBM announcing the intention to buy Red Hat.
It's maybe a subtle, but possibly important distinction. Red Hat is still its own independent entity until the deal goes through (which means IIRC passing the board's approval, SEC and likely other stuff). This is expected to happen in late 2019 I believe, but it might still fall through.
This doesn't absolutely dispel any possibility of IBM's influence, but it should be very low/zero until the merger actually goes through. But I also don't know how all this works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can understand the slippery slope threat in a proprietary system, but Fedora is a open system. Should data collection at some point go beyond whatever it is the devs announce, someone is going to pick it up and everyone is going to drop the distro like a hot potato. So I'm not sure this is a big issue.
The lack of serious consequences to Canonical regarding their spyware-like, opt-out search integrations in Ubuntu with Amazon way back when (and then doubling down with legal threats against fixubuntu.com) gives me doubt as to this being the case. That goes double given Fedora's position as what boils down to RHEL upstream. Too much corporate support for any backlash to make a dent, even if it could get critical mass…
> Better metrics overall
> Public stats page updated automatically
> Better knowledge of relative use of different variants
> Insight into Fedora's use in short-lived test systems and temporary containers vs. longer-term installations
but nothing evaluating how and whether the proposed solutions will achieve those things.
With no method being perfect, I'm suprised that no one is calling for a quantitative evaluation of various ID collection schemes, and that there is defined "good enough" value, other than
> We need better data than that.
I'm not a Fedora maintainer, and I'm not maintaining any other software of such popularity, so I have to ask: why? I assume it's to allocate work better. At which point do the downsides outweigh that benefit?
[0] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DNF_Better_Counting
"Essentially, users would need to trust that the project isn't doing the tracking because it says it isn't." The cynic in me is recalling that red hat just got bought by IBM and IBM is in the news for tracking people in a weather app in a sneaky way I don't know any better though, maybe fedora is quite independent of red hat/IBM and its 100% legit to trust their promises. I'm not sure how it works tbh Edit: added quo…
(disclaimer: I work at Red Hat, not on any OS/distro) This is a nitpick, but Red Hat did not get bought by IBM. What happened was IBM announcing the intention to buy Red Hat. It's maybe a subtle, but possibly important distinction. Red Hat is still its own independent entity until the deal goes through (which means IIRC passing the board's approval, SEC and likely other stuff). This is expected to happen in late 2019…
Why not just track downloads from the mirrors? If you post a new version of package for fedora 29, just track how many downloads of that specific file are made. Write some scripts for log processing and require official mirrors to submit the logs to give you the package counts. That way user info never makes it past the mirror (which has their IP anyways) and you don't need anything complex like UUIDs, playing tricks…
But this would be either over-counting if some CI scripts download the version every once a while, or under-counting if some organization put the image on their own privately maintained mirror which is quite common.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lack of serious consequences to Canonical regarding their spyware-like, opt-out search integrations in Ubuntu with Amazon way back when (and then doubling down with legal threats against fixubuntu.com) gives me doubt as to this being the case. That goes double given Fedora's position as what boils down to RHEL upstream. Too much corporate support for any backlash to make a dent, even if it could get critical mass…
IMHO, there were serious consequences. 5 years ago I would not have consider using fedora on my desktop because ubuntu was trustworthy and I was considering fedora as useless fragmentation. Now, I see redhat as a knight on my side to improve linux adoption (I hope that IBM will not ruin this) and I see fedora as stable and up to date than ubuntu.