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by jchw 397 days ago
To be fair, we (Nixpkgs maintainers) do remove or disable features that phone home sometimes even though it's not policy. That said, it would be nice if it was policy. Definitely was discussed before (most recently after the devbox thing I guess.)
1 comments

Discord downloads stuff every single time I start it. So there is definitely not a policy to remove this behaviour.

And yes, good point, this was indeed discussed when devbox enabled AI training by default. It somehow seems like there is more than one category of phoning home at play here, since it is obviously tolerated in other cases.

What I mean is, it definitely isn't explicit policy to remove features that phone home; but, it is sometimes still done at the package maintainer's discretion. For things that are unfree all bets are off. (Removing or interfering with such code may be against the license.)