Simon Peyton Jones via ghc-devs
Just to say:
· Telemetry is a good topic
· It is clearly a delicate one as we’ve already seen from two widely differing reactions. That’s why I have never seriously contemplated doing anything about it.
· I’m love a consensus to emerge on this, but I don’t have the bandwidth to drive it.
Incidentally, when I said “telemetry is common” I meant that almost every piece of software I run on my PC these days automatically checks for updates. It no longer even asks me if I want to do that.. it just does it. That’s telemetry right there: the supplier knows how many people are running each version of their software.
Does this necessarily count as telemetry? To be useful for statistics each installation would need to be uniquely identifiable; it's not clear to me for what fraction of software this holds. Certainly in the open-source world it's rather uncommon to tie telemetry to updates. I suppose in the Windows world this sort of thing may be more common. I'll point out that in general telemetry isn't a terribly common thing to find in open-source software save a few major projects (e.g. Firefox, Debian's popcon). I think we would be the first widely-used compiler to use such technology which does give me pause. Developers in particular tend to be more sensitive to this sort of thing than your average user. Cheers, - Ben