[urthen]

Like I said - if it matters to you, don't use it.

I've never had a problem with people that have extremely strict views of privacy. In fact I usually think they're right. But it's incredibly impractical, and most people don't currently care, which is the real problem. Treating relatively trivial things like this as if it were some conspiracy on behalf of the surveillance state doesn't do anything to get people to listen.

Get people to start dropping Facebook and Google, then we can start tackling the smaller offenses like this. Until then, treating this like you're going up against the NSA is a vanity exercise.

[catalogia]

> "Like I said - if it matters to you, don't use it."

Or he can do one better: Not use it and publicly criticize it.

[sjwright]

That’s not “better”, in fact it’s not really in the spirit of open source, where criticism comes in the form of patches and forks.

“Doing one better” would be patching and compiling from source yourself. Better still would be maintaining an up-to-date fork for the benefit of other like-minded people.

[krageon]

There's a whole lot of gatekeeping to be found in your comment and I don't think it'll help open source as a whole if things were actually as you describe. It's perfectly acceptable to call out bad behaviour and it always has been. If anything, the community became significantly more polite about it as open source software has become more popular, probably because the users are not exclusively militant programmers now.

[sjwright]

I really want to agree with you. But that assumes that the vendor/maintainer of open source software has a responsibility to not engage in "bad behaviour." I simply disagree. The only reason Linus Torvalds doesn't screw over everyone tomorrow is because he places value in the reputation of his code tree. (And also because his code tree sees so much sunlight that any such fuckery wouldn't go unnoticed.)

Clearly the maintainers of Atom don't place value in their reputation. Just be thankful that the maintainers have conveyed their true colours for all to see.

[catalogia]

> But that assumes that the vendor/maintainer of open source software has a responsibility to not engage in "bad behaviour."

> "it’s not really in the spirit of open source, where criticism comes in the form of patches and forks."

Everybody has an obligation to refrain from bad behavior whether or not they are an "open source" developer, and everybody has a right to criticize bad behavior whether or not they consume software, and whether or not the software they consume is "open source." That may not be what "open source" means to you, but in that case I want nothing to do with whatever it is that it means to you. I don't subscribe to any ideology that obligates me to hold my tongue when I see somebody doing something I think is morally wrong.

You'll just have to find a way to cope with people criticizing things or people you believe should be immune to criticism. The simple fact of the matter is you have neither the power nor authority to set the bounds for acceptable criticism. People will continue to criticize software they choose to not use, and there is nothing you can do to stop that. You certainly can't stop them by telling them to shut up or by trying to overload the definition of "open source" with your own inane pet philosophy [namely: "All criticism should be formatted as patches or forks."]

[sjwright]

You're responding to an argument that I didn't make. Your entire post appears to be a response to a fictional rewriting of my posts which doesn't exist.

For the record—:

• I didn't say (and I don't believe) that developers "should be immune to criticism"

• I didn't describe (and I do reject) an "ideology that obligates [anyone] to hold [their] tongue."

• I never defined any "bounds for acceptable criticism."

• I never said "All criticism should be formatted as patches or forks."

Nobody is obligated to act in accordance with anyone else's opinion of the spirit of a community. People are free to do whatever they wish as long as it's within the bounds of law and license conditions.

I have no problem with any form of criticism, although I do find it more worthy of one's attention when it's constructive. I do have a problem with the attitude of some people who get offended when their criticism is rejected or ignored.

What I reject is the assertion that the copyright holder of an open source software project is obligated to follow a certain mode of behaviour. By contrast, you're saying that "everybody has an obligation to refrain from bad behaviour." So in a surprise twist, it turns out the only person obligating a certain ideology upon others here is you.

[bathtub365]

Putting a restriction on the definition of open source that limits discussion to those with the time and ability to submit patches sounds, to me, like the opposite of openness. A piece of open source software being used by people outside the development group is a resounding endorsement of both the product itself and the model of open source development that led to the product being so accessible. Developers know that writing software is hard, and receiving criticism or feedback on software you worked on can be hard, too, but I think it’s ultimately to the benefit of the community of both developers and users that shortcomings (or unexpected behaviour) in the software are known. It helps people make informed decisions on what software they choose to use in their personal life, or even what software they trust to run their business on.

[sjwright]

It's not a restriction on the definition of open source. A truly open source marketplace has space for apps that do shitty things—and for forks that do fewer shitty things.

If anything is a restriction of open source, it's demanding that the developers of Atom implement a feature the way you want. If you don't like their code or their stewardship, badgering them on this one point doesn't fix the underlying difference in principles.

[sneak]

Ok, I'll bite.

Open source is a hacker thing. Hackers like open source because it avoids useless duplication of effort, which is toilsome and wasteful. Hackers don't like toil and unnecessary waste.

Forks are nothing but otherwise-unnecessary waste. They become necessary through asshattery like spying on users, but they are a last resort, because everything else about a fork is antithetical to most hackers: it's boring, wasteful, duplicated work, induced solely by an unreasonable upstream.

We try a lot of things before we fork, including naming and shaming.

[sjwright]

The imperative to fork generally stems from fundamental philosophical disagreements between the current maintainer and the user base. Concern over privacy seems pretty fundamental to me.

Badgering the maintainer doesn't fix the fundamental philosophical disagreement.

Forks don't matter if they don't succeed—it only wastes the time of people volunteering to have it wasted. But when they do succeed, sometimes amazing things happen. The history of open source is rife with hugely consequential forks.

[unityByFreedom]

> the spirit of open source, where criticism comes in the form of patches and forks

Criticism in the form of words is healthy, and this poster is beating a dead horse.

[sneak]

That's very neat, but it's not simply about me. It's about thousands and thousands of other, much less experienced people who use these software packages (Homebrew and Etcher and Atom in particular). They deserve privacy too.

I think most people don't realize. That's why these things do it silently.

Most people do care if you ask them. They don't want to be spied on. Given the option, most people will say "no, thank you". That's why these maintainers are so afraid of opt-in. They pay lip service to respecting user consent, but it's just that. They don't actually want to accurately reflect user consent, because they know that if they actually ask to measure it, they don't really have it. It's just like shitty web shops that automatically sign you up for their weekly marketing promo newsletter because you bought something one time. You don't want it, they know you don't want it, but they're still going to rob you of your time deleting them until you finally click Unsubscribe. Same deal.

Did you watch the John Oliver interview with Ed Snowden?[1] The show went out on the street and most people had no idea who he was or what he did or the information he released, but when asked if they knew that the government was logging all of their dick pics (which Ed gracefully confirmed that they are, in fact, doing), they said that they did not know and were not okay with it.

I think the core issue is ignorance, not apathy. I intend to educate people on the matter, and give them actionable steps to take to express their displeasure to the maintainers and their parent organizations. We can solve this issue before it gets any larger.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M

[saagarjha]

On the flip side, if you ask nicely I'm usually more than happy to give you some sort of usage information if it seems reasonable. If you don't, you sure aren't going to get anything from me, and I will go out of my way to stop you from collecting that information and tell other people about what you're doing, because you have clearly shown that you cannot responsibly collect usage data.