My response to @fedora’s proposal to implement opt-out data collection in Fedora, which was marked as hidden and “flagged as inappropriate: the community feels it is offensive, abusive, to be hateful conduct or a violation of our community guidelines.”
@fedora “If this is a feature you believe people want, make the toggle switches off by default so folks can excitedly tell you how much they want to send data to Fedora/Red Hat/IBM.
Also, is this a feature in Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
@fedora “…If not, and it’s something people will absolutely love, I hope it will be implemented for all your paying enterprise customers also. After all, I’m sure you’d hate for folks to think you believe corporations deserve privacy whereas people don’t. I have no doubt it will go down great with large corporations (they love profiling people so I guess that means they’d love getting profiled too, right? Unless they’re hypocrites, of course).”
@claudius@aral It was flagged by an automatic system as "potentially inappropriate", not sure why the UI lies and claims it was human decision to flag it. I manually approved the post so it's visible again.
@aral@fedora Incidentally, it is a feature in RHEL. We (Red Hat engineering) use data from it to prioritise work all the time: it's really useful in working out what's going to be most beneficial to our customers. Not sure what the default policy is, but we definitely don't get data from everybody. When using the data, we need to be mindful of industry segments who always switch it off/don't enable it (whichever applies).
But let's be honest for a moment: The Fedora Project still has close ties to Red Hat (like sponsoring and a percentage of project contributions, being the upstream source for RHEL, etc.).
Soo... I would argue that my statement "in principle" still stands.
I'm not going to throw anyone under this very angry bus, but the community member who flagged that post as off topic is not a Red Hatter, and neither was the moderators who approved it.
I am a Red Hatter, and whatever their corporate faults, I am happy to be paid full time to work on free and open source software built by an amazing community.
I don't believe anything on topic was removed from any of the discussion, except for a few extreme personal attacks.
FWIW: My opinions and statements were intended in relation to/"against" corporate stuff, not against individual people or the community.
Sometimes, emotions flare up against one practice or another, especially, well, if topics like opt-in/opt-out come up, (which also seems to be a clash of different philosophies).
But certainly nobody deserves to be thrown under figurative or literal busses for that.
And yes, for me personally, "opt-out" is a standard "corporate" tactic. But then again, I am only one person.
@aral@ceremus Yeah ... this time it was flagged by an actual person, and your post was hidden by a moderator for being "off-topic". I don't understand nor do agree with this assessment, but I don't want to just override another moderator's decision here, either 😐
@aral@ceremus I'm not sure I like how this discussion is turning out either ... it's the first proposal that's being discussed on Discourse instead of the mailing list, and almost all the things people said would happen did happen (more or less arbitrarily hiding posts / splitting them off into different topics, etc.), which is definitely something we'll need to consider when deciding if we want to use Discourse for this in the future. 😑
> This [opt-out telemetry] is a product-customer mindset that has creeped into many open source projects. In a business setting, customers don’t often participate in a community. And there it makes sense to worry about the experience of silent users, and telemetry is an easy answer. However in community projects like Fedora, community participation is the primary means of feedback.
@aral@fedora
seems like that having a corporation based, for-profit baked distro was a very bad idea from the start. Thank you Fedora for the good times, but for my next setup i'll go for a real community based distro. #fedoraLove#goodbye#debian
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