maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Ian Gilfillan <ian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I understand that the statistics would have some meaning, and understand 
that there's no actual data being sent, etc.
However, enabling the feedback plugin by default IS going to create a 
whole lot of negative publicity for MariaDB. Is the limited data the 
feedback plugin provides worthwhile? Look at the similar situation with 
Ubuntu/Canonical. No matter how much they argued there was no real risk, 
they suffered a huge amount of negative publicity and eventually 
reversed the decision.
You can argue that the data passed in that case was far more invasive 
and that they're unrelated, but there WILL be people who have a valid 
reason to be upset that their IP etc. has been unknowingly passed on, 
and saying that "you should have switched it off" or "you shouldn't have 
been using a beta version" is not a valid response after the fact. And 
then there will be even more people who have no reason to be upset, but 
will be anyway.
Why go through this pain? Rather use this as an opportunity to create a 
thorough survey (which can provide far more detailed and useful 
information than the plugin running on a beta version) and engage 
constructively with the community. The survey has other benefits too, as 
pointed out elsewhere in the thread - raising awareness of lesser-known 
features, and just spreading the survey will be marketing for MariaDB.
And by all means, give people an option to enable the plugin on 
installation, as long as it defaults to off.
ian

On 10/03/2015 13:54, Sergei Golubchik wrote:
> A survey is a pretty good idea, thanks!
>
> It may not provide a much better (as in "representative sample") statistics,
> but it will surely tell the users about the features.