[marioflach]

> we need to start asking ourselves as a community whether we think treating open-source maintainers like this is more or less likely to encourage more people to work on the open-source software you rely on to do your job.

Exactly this. The homebrew team has done an amazing job for the past 7 years, all free and volunteer work. People threatening with suing the maintainer are poison for the open-source community. But hey, haters gonna hate.

If I understand correctly, the data is anonymized before it is sent to Google [1]. How may people worrying about privacy download from Github using a proxy/vpn solution to hide their IP?

I've listened to the Changelog podcast about Homebrew and first learned about Google Analytics there. I think people do not realize how big homebrew is (in form of usage and traffic). At this scale, the maintainer opted for collecting data anonymously in order to find bottlenecks and improving the entire software stack. You can disable that feature in the same way you would disable cookies in your web browser.

[1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....