How many Fedora users are there? [LWN.net]

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 7:43 UTC (Thu) by beejaybee (guest, #1581)
Parent article: How many Fedora users are there?

As if the Red Hat people care:

I will not be a Fedora user so long as their installation contains spy bugs or attempts to "phone home" at any time for any reason without my explicit consent.

There are lots of other distributions out there.

If other people react sensibly (as I think I'm doing) then the metrics that the Fedora people want will be easy to obtain - a big fat circle will suffice.

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How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 8:25 UTC (Thu) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]

Businesspeople think in metrics. They want to measure *everything*. That's how they work. Your personal information is not even vaguely interesting to them in this case; all you are is just a '1' in the 'Users' column.

And as they point out in the article, if you've ever used RedHat's update servers, they know you exist already.

They're doing a lot of work in packaging up and debugging the distro... do you really begrudge them that '1'? It's not like Microsoft, where they send back a whole bunch of data about your computer... this is just an existence count.

Yes, I think if it goes to any more data than that, anything even vaguely descriptive about the computer or what's installed or who you are, it should have a consent form. But a totally anonymous existence check seems entirely harmless to me.

What *possible* drawback can this have for you? Is your '1' valuable enough that you'll refuse an entire distro to prevent it?

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 9:41 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]

There's a matter of principle here: they're getting this information in a sneaky underhand way, and some folks (not myself) will object to this so strongly that they'll refuse the distribution. I just think it's not the right thing.

Why not ask the user? Have an installation screen with a choice to be made. Ask "Let Fedora know that I'm running this system" (by default) or "Don't ...". Include a description of exactly what information is obtained if you accept (very little) and why it is helpful to Fedora to know this. And, of course, a corresponding kickstart option.

I don't think many people will refuse, especially since the truth of the statement can be checked with the source code by any paranoid hacker.

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 13:31 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]

Just to be clear - there's no reason to be angry about this.

There will be no tracking image. It is NOT going to be done. It was successfully discarded as an idea for this (and probably any other) release.

The only data we're planning on looking through is apache logs of people connecting to get the mirrorlists for updates of packages.

-sv

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 19, 2006 23:21 UTC (Thu) by seg (guest, #41224) [Link]

Why is checking the apache log on the mirror list script okay but checking the apache log on an image is SNEAKY AND UNDERHANDED?

Did you know !!!!!!!!!! YOUR COMPUTER IS BROADCASTING AN IP ADDRESS RIGHT NOW !!!!!!!!!