Transparent Telemetry for Open-Source Projects

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • mach

    zig game engine & graphics toolkit

  • I've been a pretty strong advocate of the idea that analytics should always be minimal, 100% anonymous, aggregated, and open to the public - otherwise it’s spying. This is how we do analytics on our websites today[0][1], and how we plan to do it in games we release in the future. Maybe one day I will start a dedicated FOSS service that people can use for exactly this with some trusted reputation/transparency/auditability to it.

    I think what Russ has described here is decent and well-reasoned. I also think that Go being a product (it is, whether you like that word or not) makes it more fair to desire analytics of this form. I think it being opt-out is reasonable (after all, if it is not, they will make decisions using data that does not come from the vast majority of users, may as well not have analytics at all then.)

    But I am afraid of this becoming pervasive not just in products (like CLI tools), but also in libraries, imagine every Go/npm package you use wants to ping the network because the authors want to know 'is this popular? can we deprecate XYZ method?' etc. If transparent telemetry in the form Russ and I have been viewing it becomes a more common thing, it won't be a surprise if more library authors begin to try to adopt something like this and it becomes a pervasive problem IMHO.

    [0] https://hexops.com/privacy

    [1] https://machengine.org

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

    WorkOS logo
NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts