[rcoveson]

> Interesting opportunity to potentially improve things.

...you mean by changing commercial software to collect telemetry more like FOSS tools do, i.e. usually not at all, right?

[tstrimple]

It's interesting how many people assume telemetry is just for spying on users and not an honest attempt to actually improve the product. Usability on most FOSS tooling is garbage. Even gems like Blender have incredibly rough edges compared to their commercial counterparts and that's one of the best examples of UX in FOSS. If users are spending a disproportionate amount of time performing operation X, I want to zoom in on operation X and find out what is holding them up and if it can be streamlined. I get that a lot of these metrics can be used more nefariously, but if you want to improve something you've first got to measure it or you have no baseline to determine if your "improvement" actually made a difference.

Telemetry and usage information is not bad in and of itself. It's a perfectly valid tool that can be used to find rough edges on your product and improve them. It's a great way to determine the most commonly used operations. Every developer who has worked on products used by real people inevitably discovers that their users approach their software in ways completely different than intended. Some of these unintended ways represent valid use cases the developer or product owner never anticipated. If you discover these things, you can improve the product by making that operation a first class operation instead of a weird workaround. If you're not collecting metrics, you're only listening to the most noisy parts of your user base who are by definition a small minority.

[wakawaka28]

People are desensitized to claims of possible product improvements because closed-source software says it's collecting telemetry for that reason too, despite the fact it is used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. While it could be possible to get useful information from telemetry, there's no way for the collector to verify anything about popularity without violating your privacy. I don't think there is anything wrong with having an opt-in system for people who want to be involved while leaving everyone else alone. I think AUR and maybe NPM have voting systems. Github also acts as kind of a voting system, with its stars. Package downloads are a good semi-anonymous metric that works without telemetry. It could be gamed, but if someone was enthusiastic enough to game it then maybe their project should be considered active.

[vundercind]

It doesn’t matter what it’s for: it is spying on users.

[mhh__]

I would probably rather nothing logged, but I must say that when working on a language inside a company (rather than open source) and being able to do telemetry is a massive win.

[NelsonMinar]

No, that's not what I mean.