Can’t say I’m surprised that putting one day’s of work into getting the industry to adopt a proposed standard you came up with yourself didn’t really work out. Based on your other comments you also seem to have some level of contempt for some of the projects that you were trying to influence.
Yes, contempt is an accurate assessment. Shipping nonconsensual spyware is unethical, and there are too many devs in our industry who are happy to behave unethically so long as their boss tells them to.
Creating more social and reputational consequences for individual worker bees who make such commits on the job is also on my to-do list.
Ultimately the opt out vars are token efforts by developers anyway. These projects only do the bare minimum of opt-out-ability because they have to be able to point to the opt-out setting as justification for their shipping of spyware-by-default. Making it easier to opt out isn't something they want, regardless of how much I do or don't mask my contempt for such unethical, user-hostile practices.
The way the Audacity thing is playing out is instructive. Many devs simply feel entitled to take over your machine as if it is theirs and your double-click is a blank check. My PRs against autoupdates have run in to similar developer resistance.
> Creating more social and reputational consequences for individual worker bees who make such commits on the job is also on my to-do list.
Wow. This is a terrible approach for a worthy problem. You want to make the options into "lose my livelihood via being fired or lose my livelihood via social and rep consequences"? That is awful.
I'm looking forward when I'll be cancelled because I left the default branch name as master on my public github repos.
No joke, in my mind this "solution" is on the same level as this monstrous cancelculture. You put a tracking in an OSS project that sends 2 anonym ID and maybe an IP address (which is easily spoofable anyway)? Time to cancel your career and your livelihood.
Historically, there have always nearly always been negative consequences for doing things that infringe the rights of others.
If someone else telling the truth about one's actions on their webpage is a threat, perhaps people should be more measured in the actions they undertake.
What I'm describing is reporting, not cancellation.
But please explain how publicly calling out and potentially doxxing developers would help this issue? Do you really want to target single developers and unleash the fury of the HN crown on them?
If we talk about morality and ethics, I think this is worse than implementing tracking, isn't it?
I know you guys wants to change the world and I absolutely agree that there are too many tracking in the world, but FFS, let's just take a step back and think about YOUR actions and their consequences.
Not everyone has the luxury to quit a job if they don't agree with the morality of their work. I know we are talking about OSS, but lot of the developers are living on the donations and sponsorships or even got bought out by larger companies and to keep their jobs, they have to do said implementations.
Those probably didn’t help your cause.