[aviaviavi]

This argument conflates licensing of a piece software with the the distribution channel that distributes artifacts of that software. The service being discussed here is purely part of the distribution layer and has no footprint on the artifacts themselves. It's merely a passthrough layer sitting in front of the current stack.

If you are using open source today, you're already hitting servers that have access to all of the same information Scarf sees. Visiting a URL is by definition asking a server on the other side to process your request. That data can be very helpful to all of the great open source maintainers out there, but has historically been difficult or impossible to access. The result will be better informed maintainers, and better OSS for everyone.

[smoldesu]

Take your cut, pick-and-choose your criticism, but remember you're working in a privacy-conscious sector.

[aviaviavi]

Absolutely agree. And that's why we've put so much effort into making sure the system handles all PII as correctly and securely as possible.

End-user privacy does not need to be compromised in order to give OSS maintainers a basic quantitative understanding of how their software is used. This is our best attempt at a solution. We will be continually improving it better however we can.