I mean that as a group, people who crusade against monitoring of client software on end users' machines, will in the long run be accelerating the shift towards more software being web based.
If I'm deciding between a desktop and a web client for my software, monitoring is a concern. If I suspect I'll either a) not get enough opt-ins for montoring or b) end up in a publicity shitstorm if I use opt-out, then I'll just opt to run the software on my server instead.
The amount of monitoring and tracking that is done on server side software is obivoulsy going to be a LOT more than what "anonymous usage data" would be for the client version. And that's a bit ironic (that it might have the opposite effect).
Obviously scenario isn't about this software specifically. A compiler isn't going to be "web based" tomorrow. It was more a comment about the software landscape and the privacy debate in general.
Microsoft has been pumping out proprietary crapware for decades, while those of us who cared about freedom and security have continued to ignore it, despite it even being pop culture at times.
The lack of basic ethics on this topic is a great example of what people mean when they assert that software engineering isn't real engineering. Software should represent the interests of its prospective users, period. Inserting anti-features that directly go against the interest of the user to benefit the author is a violation of trust, and is blatantly unethical.
But sure, keep convincing yourself that if users don't like you violating them a bit, it's just naturally pragmatic to abuse them even worse. Either way whatever you create can't be considered trustworthy.
As for the original topic, the real problem is that it would be a rug pull - classic Google. If this were a new language built with surveillance in the compiler, nobody would use it. But if the maintainers decide to add in hostile features after the language has gained wide adoption, it will take a lot of churn to sort out, fork, sandbox, etc.
If I'm deciding between a desktop and a web client for my software, monitoring is a concern. If I suspect I'll either a) not get enough opt-ins for montoring or b) end up in a publicity shitstorm if I use opt-out, then I'll just opt to run the software on my server instead.
The amount of monitoring and tracking that is done on server side software is obivoulsy going to be a LOT more than what "anonymous usage data" would be for the client version. And that's a bit ironic (that it might have the opposite effect).
Obviously scenario isn't about this software specifically. A compiler isn't going to be "web based" tomorrow. It was more a comment about the software landscape and the privacy debate in general.