Hacker News Reader

Tracking my usage was never part of the social contract of OSS. This post is a reminder of that.

What social contract is that?

As far as I'm aware, the contract of OSS is "you can fork this to change it, if you don't like it" (license permitting).

A big part of the reason people advocate for OSS is so they can read the source code to understand what's going on, and change the parts they don't like. Telemtry sits squarely under that usecase.

I agree that it's good manners for projects made users aware of telemetry, but there's no "contract" that implies they have to.

He was talking about the social contract, not the license. OSS is a community that has mores, expectations, and social contracts like any other community. Spying is very much in opposition to that social contract.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com