VSCodium – An Open Source Visual Studio Code Without Trackers

Re:VSCodium – An Open Source Visual Studio Code Without Trac... by Vinnl on Saturday April 13, 2019 @03:19AM (#19651536)

One of the more flabbergasting comments I've seen is when Mozilla removed ALSA support from Firefox because nobody stepped up to maintain it, and the metrics showed that it wasn't widely used. There were people complaining about it being removed, and stating that the people who did use it were more likely to have turned off tracking, and thus did not show up.

I mean, sure, it might be the case that there were indeed tens of thousands of ALSA users with tracking turned off, but... From my perspective, it seems more likely that it was just a handful, and really there's no way to tell the difference. If you turn off telemetry, and be aware of and accept the downsides.

I trust Mozilla, so my telemetry is on, but for many other applications, I often opt to turn off tracking - with the understanding that it's harder for them to tell what my needs are.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:VSCodium – An Open Source Visual Studio Code Without Trac... by Nullabillity on Saturday April 13, 2019 @04:32AM (#19651779)

So now we need to allow surveillance, just to prevent the biased data set from ruining the software even more?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:VSCodium – An Open Source Visual Studio Code Without Trac... by Vinnl on Saturday April 13, 2019 @08:33AM (#19652634)

No, you don't need to do that, but if you don't, you should realise that that results in biased data, and thus influences the focus of development. If you have an alternative other than "the developers should just magically guess what would make users happy", then I'd be happy to hear it, but otherwise, that's just the way the world works, and thus that's the trade-off you will have to make.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:VSCodium – An Open Source Visual Studio Code Without Trac... by wolco on Saturday April 13, 2019 @09:37AM (#19652934)

Then less people will use there new version. If they want to rely on this one datasource only be prepared to have it gamed or not reflect reality.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:VSCodium – An Open Source Visual Studio Code Without Trac... by Vinnl on Sunday April 14, 2019 @03:59AM (#19658128)

Well, again, it'd be great to hear what other information they should rely on other than magically guessing what people want.

[ Parent | on HN ]