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Comment by victor9000 | Hacker News Reader

Don't go down this road.

The moment you place corporate needs ahead of user needs is the moment you start losing user advocates (UAs). New features are shiny objects that may attract interest, but UAs are your long-term lifeblood. They don't just use your product, they recommend it to friends, teams, bosses, and organizations.

I'm not going to be as pessimistic as others in this thread bc I know you guys have what it takes to do the right thing. But know that a tide change has occurred when it comes to privacy and data, and technical folks are keenly aware of the importance of protecting both.

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I agree that user advocates are our lifeblood and we're risking alienating them. There were many more concerns than we expected. We’re going to process the feedback and rethink our plan. We will not activate product usage tracking on GitLab.com or GitLab self-managed before we address the feedback and re-evaluate our plan. We will make sure to communicate our proposed changes prior to any changes to GitLab.com or self-managed instances, and give sufficient time for people to provide feedback for a new proposal. We'll work in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5672

> There were many more concerns than we expected.

I really don't understand how this can be true. Just reading it briefly I knew there were going to be a ton of concerns.

Honestly, it's shocking that this came as a surprise. It's like they don't know why they made Gitlab self-hostable.

> We will not activate product usage tracking on GitLab.com or GitLab self-managed before we address the feedback and re-evaluate our plan.

I would like to see a harder commitment: to simply not do this. Gitlab does not have any credible reasons to add product usage tracking that does not have substantial downsides, better to steer clear of this completely.

Judging from the discussion in [1], the "going down this road" already started to happen about half a year ago. Please notice how everyone in conversation seems to implicitly understand that their customers won't like the new forced telemetry, but still pushing on this, "for customers' own good" (with the only possible exception being made for public sector customers).

1. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/telemetry/issues/34

This.

When your enterprise and open source offering start to diverge, there's no way back. Also your free and open core starts to feel like a freemium product.

I run 3 GitLab instances in various places for different people and organizations. If GitLab starts to go that way, I'll not install any new instances, won't recommend them and migrate my instances as soon as I can.

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