EDIT: To be fair there is some transparency in the original post. I was looking through the landing page for it (where it is not mentioned). Also, imho it should still be opt-in even for beta. Not everyone is going to read the wall of text to parse out the buried note on telemetry
they actually listen to our feedback, remove forced telemetry, remove sign-in in the next release, then i'd be more happy to give their product another chance
although no guarantee they'll not turn evil at some point in the future...
If a company is committed to never spying, then they'd have no problem making such terms contractually binding on their end. Companies that say they're against spying, but leave the option to collect their users' data open for the future, aren't really committed to not spying.
But yeah, terminals are very sensitive environments, opt-in should be a default even at launch.
Then why would anybody bother to invest in their next series?
Their getting started instructions [0] are all just terminal commands too, and even that doesn't mention Mac once.
Not that it is not annoying, it is, but that's pretty common with Mac-only software in my experience.
We should make it even more transparent what we collect. You can see it here: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel...
Re: big business, we're still pretty small, but it's true that we are trying to build a business around the command-line. I get that's controversial and it's not something that exists and that the terminal is a super-sensitive low level tool.
We will never ever build a business around terminal data, and to be super explicit, we are 100% not collecting any command inputs or outputs.
The business that we want to build is around making a terminal (or a platform for text based apps) that grows because it makes individuals and teams a lot more productive on the command line.
I've there's one thing I've taken away from this ShowHN so far is that there is a lot of well-founded concern about the terminal and user data and that we need to do a better job on this issue.
Given that, it's probably the case that the only options are to either be fully open source or to make a fully offline mode an option.
In any case, I think the concept for your product is excellent—it's been mind-boggling to me that something along these lines wasn't tackled years ago, so I look forward to your guys' future success, hopefully moving the state of terminal interaction into the modern era.
It's not just that the level of trust is very low. I shouldn't need to place any trust in the developers of my terminal at all. If I can't know for a fact that it's not acting against my interests, then I'll pass. I already have such a big selection of fully open-source terminals available. Why would I even consider taking any king of risk with this one?
My advice here would be to simply make telemetry opt-in during the beta period. I’m typically pretty liberal about opting in to telemetry (particularly when the extent of which is documented), but obviously a lot of your users will not be. Your desire to accelerate your progress seems to conflate with the needs of your target demo, and I think this warrants adjustment.
Look at the recent logging fiasco for an example.
Which library was/is doing this? Would like to avoid it.
