CodePlex Users get Application Analytics Data (Port 25) [LWN.net]

Microsoft's Port 25 blog ("Communication from the Open Source Community at Microsoft") reports on an upgrade to the CodePlex open source project hosting site that allows projects to instrument their code to get runtime analytics. For those open source projects that aren't using Visual Studio 2010, it recommends something called "Dotfuscator", which is a proprietary .NET binary obfuscator, to inject the intstrumentation. (VS2010 evidently already includes it). This is a rather different view of open source than we are used to. "The Runtime Intelligence Service lets developers inject usage instrumentation directly into application binaries. When the application is run by an end-user, the instrumentation will collect analytics data from the application, but no personally identifiable information is ever collected, and applications can include opt-out dialogues."

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CodePlex Users get Application Analytics Data (Port 25)

Posted May 8, 2010 7:59 UTC (Sat) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link] (3 responses)

Until now it was possible to be naive and think CodePlex was just a badly managed and PR'ed regular open source site.

It's still possible, but now we must try really hard...

CodePlex Users get Application Analytics Data (Port 25)

Posted May 8, 2010 9:58 UTC (Sat) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

Strange things happen when developers get the urge to gather feedback from installed code. For a long time, Mozilla milestone builds included a proprietary crash reporting tool called Talkback to report when it crashed. Obviously, it would be better to have fully free tools for this kind of thing, but perhaps some open source projects consider that the help to the project from getting the extra analytics will outweigh the harm from using proprietary software to do it. For example, I know many projects have signed up to use the proprietary Coverity checker.

CodePlex Users get Application Analytics Data (Port 25)

Posted May 8, 2010 10:30 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Coverty is not part of the standard toolchain each developer has.

Mozilla had this proprietary component since before it was a free software.

CodePlex Users get Application Analytics Data (Port 25)

Posted May 11, 2010 8:32 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

Mozilla replaced the Talkback tool with one based on Google's open source Breakpad system. There is a link to the source code of the server portion at the bottom of http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/ too.