Ask HN: Should open source projects track you?

3 points by andreacavagna 3 years ago | 9 comments

Hello everyone, I'm the maintainer of an open-source DeveloperTool (https://github.com/Noovolari/leapp)

With a heuristic of 7000 users daily, I started feeling the need to have more information on how Users are using the project to improve it.

Is it the right thing to do to create a better Developer Experience and gain feedback for the end users?

On a side: "it's acceptable for open source software not to work is a great thing. This makes it easy for anyone to contribute because there are no hurdles from what your work must include or not include - it's up to you. Mistakes, or half-baked projects included. You can't have innovation without a lot of people being able to contribute and make mistakes, or give up."

As pointed out in the PostHog article below, I extracted some important passage:

"From a utilitarian perspective, We believe that tracking the minimum data possible to build useful technology, in a way that doesn't share that data with 3rd parties, means that you have the right approach to product analytics in your open source project."

In most cases tracking user data to enrich functionalities means you have to deal with an opt-out/opt-in setting (like VSCode does) to get data to the open-source project's maintainers; developers are the most sensitive people regarding data.

I've never added this tracking on the Desktop App since I'm worried about the community's reaction. And this is a direct message to them.

Is it right to have people helping the growth of the open-source project by tracking only fewer data to improve stability and functionality?

"All tracking is bad, many say. We disagree. Done right, it enables more and better software in the world. When it's applied to open source, it often enables more free software for anyone to use."

P.S. I'm not yet a user of PostHog, but I want to congrats with them on the article, and the best way (if it is a good thing) to track open-source data is to do it with an open-source project too.

All the references are from the below blog post. Great article, guys! => https://posthog.com/blog/open-source-telemetry-ethical

btown 3 years ago |

There are some situations where I'd say opt-in telemetry, properly messaged and with transparency/user-visible logs about what is uploaded, is fine.

But your tool is specifically for handling highly sensitive credentials, and telemetry can be used as part of an attack surface. For your tool, any hint of telemetry, even opt-in, would be a massive red flag.

Having a feedback button that launches a plain old mailto: link might be a good balance to provide an additional mechanism to learn about users' pain points.

andreacavagna 3 years ago | |

This is why the project handle all data locally only.

Adding an opt-in for telemetry is largely used in App that handle high sensitive data, like VScode and Insomnia API are handling them. The only data to be collected is when the App is active and when the app is inactive.

But I understand tour point of view

> Having a feedback button that launches a plain old mailto: link might be a good balance to provide an additional mechanism to learn about users' pain points.

This could be a great addiction to the Issues mechanism of GitHub. We've already added a preformat way to open an issue with Leapp directly from the app. But I don't know if this is enough

jjgreen 3 years ago |

Since PostHog is a commercial user-tracking product, such an argument seems rather self-serving. And justified by utilitarianism? In a moral swamp then ...

andreacavagna 3 years ago | |

I don't want to see the post just from the PostHog side, which is biased by definition.

VSCode and Insomnia(https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/pull/5416) taken as electron-based App examples are doing the same with an opt-out telemetry.

As said by them: "Visual Studio Code collects telemetry data, which is used to help understand how to improve the product. For example, this usage data helps to debug issues, such as slow start-up times, and to prioritize new features"

What are your thoughts on that?

jjgreen 3 years ago | | |

Well I wouldn't touch VSCode with a shitty stick, and this sort of unpleasantness makes me glad of that decision. Not even the nosey bunch that make Go could persuade people of "opt-out" telemetry, truly horrible.

But it rather sounds that you have made up your mind already, no?

pwg 3 years ago |

> Should open source projects track you?

Simple answer: NO

andreacavagna 3 years ago | |

I agree.

Tracking is bad. But having a telemetry on the usage can drastically improve the solidity of an OSS project, especially if the usage is growing vertically.

As I pointed out, the OSS project right now have no information at all about the usage of it

pwg 3 years ago | | |

Again: NO

No tracking, no telemetry, no nothing. It is unfortunate, but that is the only good answer.