[Santosh83]

> When your telemetry is easy, open, and transparent, people will gladly opt-in when they think it's needed.

Well said. As a favour to the developers, I have always chosen to opt in for telemetry when it was asked upfront and in a transparent and guileless manner. One example is Firefox, where I opt in for its telemetry.

What I suspect I (and others) don't like is software that treats the user as if they're too dumb to decide for themselves and somehow too inconsequential to have full control over the software that they have bought. It gives off the impression that the software is more important than the user or their work/machine, which is why we see such a backlash. Stallman is right in this sense. You don't need to open source your software, but make the user your priority. Treat them well. And watch your software be praised far and wide. Conversely....

[contextfree]

they don't just want to get a lot of data, they want representative data. they're afraid that, even if many/most people opt in, if the sort of person who opts in is different from the sort of person who doesn't, and has different usage patterns, the data will be skewed.