It would probably have such a bad UX that no one will bother installing it. Problem solved.

That is both painful to read and accurate.

There was recently a big kerfuffle over something kinda like that. Look into recent noise about Audacity audio editor to see how that played out… ;)

Edit: Curious what part of the above statement is unhelpful or inaccurate…

Since the telemetry is opt-in, some people disagree that Audacity should be called "spyware" for including it as an option. From the original pull request:

> Telemetry is strictly optional and disabled by default. No data is shared unless you choose to opt-in and enable telemetry.

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

Ars Technica published an article describing the controversy as "massively overblown" and I agree with their analysis:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/no-open-source-audac...

> Since the telemetry is opt-in, some people disagree that Audacity should be called "spyware" …

I could totally see that I guess… My point was more that the way folks reacted to that would probably be a pretty accurate indicator of how well "open source spyware" would be likely received. ;)

It resulted in a spyware/telemetry free fork. Which is how free software spyware will generally go.

>Curious what part of the above statement is unhelpful or inaccurate…

I have no idea how you think the incident played out. Your post is basically "something like that happened, there were results."

> It resulted in a spyware/telemetry free fork. Which is how free software spyware will generally go.

Pretty much exactly my thinking on the topic. It also resulted in them changing and/or clarifying some of the things they thought were the cause of the complaints. Still led to a fork anyhow.

Not sure audacity telemetry will get you chopped to pieces in your country’s embassy

I sure do hope not, but these days it sometimes seems like too many humans are waiting for any excuse to chop each other to pieces (figuratively and literally).