Re: Telemetry on by default kitty

[Leo Famulari]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2021 at 11:32:01AM +0200, Leo Prikler wrote:
> Of course, there's the added bonus of the lead developer
> expressing their views in a… rather aggressive tone to put it mildly,
> but that's a social problem.

To be fair to the author, the bug report described a simple update
notifier as "surveillance" and said that Goyal is contributing "to the
normalization of surveillance in GNU/Linux software."

Those are opinions, not facts.

The bug reporter's social skills were also quite poor; you don't begin
to ask for something by using pejorative terms and accusing people of
doing something nefarious. It is insulting.

Because Kitty has an automatic update notifier built-in, it's obvious
that Kitty is intended to be distributed outside of the old-school
GNU/Linux distro model, and that means that automatic updates are
expected and valuable. Distros like Guix are the entities who are doing
something weird in this scenario.

Not to mention that telemetry about crashes and usage are extremely
valuable for developers. The free software community's resistance to
that kind of automated feedback is an important factor in the overall
low quality of free software relative to other non-free operating
systems, in my opinion. There are many reasons that "the masses" choose
not to use GNU/Linux despite extremely widespread popular
dissatisfaction with "big tech", and low quality and poor integration is
a big one, in my experience.