[isatty]

Why do people use obvious spyware when free software exists?

[muppetman]

Well there's a middle ground - Sublime Text isn't free but it's fantastic and isn't sending back all my code/work to the Chinese Government. Sorry, "Telemetry"

[quectophoton]

And the other side of the middle ground, Grafana being AGPL but requiring you to disable 4 analytics flags, 1 gravatar flag, and (I think) one of their default dashboards was also fetching news from a Grafana URL.

https://github.com/grafana/tempo/discussions/5001#discussion...

(Yes, that's for Grafana tempo, but the issue in `grafana/grafana` was just marked as duplicate of this.)

[ddd34drf3]

Another middle ground is CudaText, it is free and without telemetry.

[throwaway328]

Yes, why do people use products from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, ...

[guessmyname]

> Yes, why do people use products from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, ...

I work at Apple, so I’m not concerned about being monitored—it’s all company-owned equipment and data anyway.

It was the same when I worked at Microsoft. I used Microsoft products exclusively, regardless of any potential privacy concerns.

Employees at Google and Amazon do the same. It’s known as “dogfooding”—using your own products to test and improve them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food).

As for why people outside these companies use their products, it usually comes down to two reasons: a) Their employer has purchased licenses and wants employees to use them, either for compliance or to get value from the investment; or b) They genuinely like the product—whether it’s because of its features, price, performance, support, or overall experience.

[davidmurdoch]

Because the alternatives suck.

In this case, the software being analyzed is the alternative that sucks.

[krisworld11]

If we are talking about telemetry…. Seriously all these products are sending telemetry data

[bowsamic]

Because there’s a huge amount of money behind smearing free software

[bilinguliar]

As an asset who successfully infiltrated a rival country's tech company you want deniability. Bringing your own IDE does not look suspicious.

[charcircuit]

Telemetry isn't the same thing as spying on the user. People use it because it's not actually spying on them.

[malfist]

It is literally spying on the user.

Unless you're somehow saying telemetry doesn't report anything about what a user is doing to it's home server.

[bayindirh]

Anonymized or not, opt-out telemetry is plain spying. Go was about to find out, and they backed out the last millisecond and converted to opt-in, for example.

[driverdan]

Any monitoring of my system without my explicit permission is spying.

[doctorpangloss]

Ha ha, free software also has tons of telemetry, it just belongs to GitHub.

[aspenmayer]

> We need to bring back shaming and social isolation

HN is not your army, and it isn’t a theater of ideological battle.

Please don’t do that here.

[yard2010]

Or anything else from their party..

[rs186]

Eh, I don't know how you could tell it is "obvious" "spyware", unless you are referring to the fact that it comes from Bytedance.

[Biganon]

The mere fact that disabling telemetry does not at all disable telemetry is enough for it to be called spyware.

[jen20]

Have Bytedance produced literally anything to that assumption unreasonable?