Matt Rickard

Share this post

Should OSS Projects Have Telemetry?

blog.matt-rickard.com

Discover more from Matt Rickard

Thoughts on engineering, startups, and AI.
Continue reading
Sign in

Should OSS Projects Have Telemetry?

Feb 9, 2023
Share this post

Should OSS Projects Have Telemetry?

blog.matt-rickard.com
Share

Russ Cox, the tech lead for the Go programming language at Google, made a case for adding opt-out telemetry to the language's toolchain in Transparent Telemetry for Open-Source Projects.

As a former open-source maintainer of some fairly large projects, I understand the pain. Without telemetry – you're a product manager flying blind to feedback. From more complex questions: What features are getting used? What APIs are dependent on? To table-stakes questions: How many users are using this tool? Did the last release break something?

Developers often have a viscerally adverse reaction to telemetry. It represents centralization, tracking, and everything wrong with the software industry. Maybe it's just a vocal minority, but developers' revealed preference does not match their stated preference – most developers still use VSCode as their IDE, sending thousands of telemetry events per session. Likewise, Go still collects data through the Go module proxy. And there are far more examples of telemetry in popular projects – Java, C#, .NET Core, Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, GitLab, and many others.

Share this post

Should OSS Projects Have Telemetry?

blog.matt-rickard.com
Share
Previous
Next
Comments
Top
New
Community

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Matt Rickard
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing