With a heuristic of 7000 users daily, I started feeling the need to have more information on how Users are using the project to improve it.
Is it the right thing to do to create a better Developer Experience and gain feedback for the end users?
On a side: "it's acceptable for open source software not to work is a great thing. This makes it easy for anyone to contribute because there are no hurdles from what your work must include or not include - it's up to you. Mistakes, or half-baked projects included. You can't have innovation without a lot of people being able to contribute and make mistakes, or give up."
As pointed out in the PostHog article below, I extracted some important passage:
"From a utilitarian perspective, We believe that tracking the minimum data possible to build useful technology, in a way that doesn't share that data with 3rd parties, means that you have the right approach to product analytics in your open source project."
In most cases tracking user data to enrich functionalities means you have to deal with an opt-out/opt-in setting (like VSCode does) to get data to the open-source project's maintainers; developers are the most sensitive people regarding data.
I've never added this tracking on the Desktop App since I'm worried about the community's reaction. And this is a direct message to them.
Is it right to have people helping the growth of the open-source project by tracking only fewer data to improve stability and functionality?
"All tracking is bad, many say. We disagree. Done right, it enables more and better software in the world. When it's applied to open source, it often enables more free software for anyone to use."
P.S. I'm not yet a user of PostHog, but I want to congrats with them on the article, and the best way (if it is a good thing) to track open-source data is to do it with an open-source project too.
All the references are from the below blog post. Great article, guys! => https://posthog.com/blog/open-source-telemetry-ethical
