[Ardour-Users] ardour & "phoning home"

[Ross Johnson]

Simon Wise wrote:
> On 09/08/10 10:26, Ross Johnson wrote:
>> Arnold Krille wrote:
>>> On Saturday 07 August 2010 02:16:58 Ross Johnson wrote:
>>>> Paul Davis wrote:
>>>>> Why am I adding this to Ardour?
>
> ...
>
>>> I would advice to go a similar route to what ffado does: ask the user,
>>> tell him why we want to know, tell him what we want to know, allow for
>>> anonymous sending and not sending at all (as well as identified
>>> sending). And redo that procedure on every new version so you get more
>>> accurate numbers.
>>>
>> This is ok with me provided it's not hidden away or obfuscated so the
>> user has a clear choice. That why distributions are less likely to turn
>> it off as well.
>
> The challenge here is to avoid the situation where very few people opt 
> in. There seems to be a couple of issues here ...
>
> 1) It IS important to have this data.
>
As a FLOSS user and FLOSS developer I am happy to provide information 
that enhances the success of the product. I would be significantly less 
happy if that same information led to the prioritisation of, say, MacOS 
development over Linux development.

Given that it is possible to download [from the Ardour site] a MacOS 
binary for Ardour, but Linux has to be built from source and therefore 
provides more opportunity to turn phone-home off, this is very likely to 
bias the usage stats heavily in favour of MacOS. So I would like to know 
a lot more about how the stats will be analysed to compensate for these 
distortions.

And in closing, I still haven't seen discussion of the possible future 
addition of "watermarking". What would be the intent of that in Ardour? 
And the fact that it was referred to in the same context as phone-home 
gave the whole matter an ominous overtone (no pun intended) and a taint 
of the most onerous proprietary products.