I'm curious. Is there a reason to not build in some sort of ping for the software being used? Essentially doing analytics for open source usage so you can monitor how many people use it?
Obviously there are some potential privacy issues here, but adding it to the README and doing a single ping on use seems like not too bad a compromise to keeping open source projects alive.
It won't be 100% accurate due to offline use or available to many open source software projects due to their use case, but most applications would probably connect.
Surprise telemetry is deeply unethical. Putting it in the README is borderline OK, I guess. However, even supposing it's OK, a "single ping on use" is only really feasible if the system has "main()" and some reasonably persistent usage. If you're a small tool - or a library, like we were, "single ping on use" might result in thousands of systems "beaconing" back to home base per hour.
For the area we were in (pattern matching is basically computer security-adjacent), this would have been equivalent to shipping malware in terms of sheer career-destroying potential.
Obviously there are some potential privacy issues here, but adding it to the README and doing a single ping on use seems like not too bad a compromise to keeping open source projects alive.
It won't be 100% accurate due to offline use or available to many open source software projects due to their use case, but most applications would probably connect.