> The reaction to this whole saga has been insane. Chill out people.
I very much disagree. I think the outcry was warranted, and right now I see GitLab doing the right thing (and, obviously, the outcry was a huge reason for that).
Changing plans in the harsh light of public condemnation isn't easy, and for that I very much commend GitLab. As someone who was very much against the previously announced change, though ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21350146 ), I'm glad the community feedback was so strong.
Yeah, if the outcry continued even after their rollback & apology, _then_ it would be unwarranted. But everyone's happy now (well, arguably GitLab may not be, but they should surely be able to work out a solution with the community on how to collect telemetrics in a privacy-conscious way).
I'm also glad the feedback was so strong, as the ad-tech industry has spent the past 15 years numbing the general populace to unwarranted (and often unnecessary) telemetrics.
It's understandable that GitLab had no ill-intentions. But how can one know whether third-parties share such sentiments?
> Yeah, if the outcry continued even after their rollback & apology, _then_ it would be unwarranted.
The outcry may stop but the trust is now gone and will take years to rebuild. Next time I'm considering/recommending on-premise git hosting I won't be recommending gitlab.
I'm also considering moving my personal repos that I pay for. Generally I only interact through the CLI and don't think about the web interface much, but apparently when I go there I'm sharing info with whatever the hell gravatar is.
While I haven't used it myself, I think gravitar is an avatar that gravitates toward you, as implemented by you putting an image on their server, and countless other websites include it from that server when an identifier (probably email address) match exists between the two accounts. So in other words, gravitar knows a bit about your usage of countless websites that each volunteered your usage pattern to it. Since evidently you are seeing a connection between your machine and gravatar, they get page-load granularity. If this description is incorrect, which it very well might be since I know nothing about the service beyond what I inferred by its name, please do correct me.
It doesn't seem to me that GP disagrees with that. They're not telling people to chill out in the sense that they should have voiced their concerns about the feature; it's about the outcry, about the black-and-white, evil-vs-good type of discourse that was happening in response to it.
I very much disagree. I think the outcry was warranted, and right now I see GitLab doing the right thing (and, obviously, the outcry was a huge reason for that).
Changing plans in the harsh light of public condemnation isn't easy, and for that I very much commend GitLab. As someone who was very much against the previously announced change, though ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21350146 ), I'm glad the community feedback was so strong.