This poll is a bit hard to understand but essentially you could vote for multiple options, the highest opt-out option is at 26%, meaning 74% of people oppose this idea.
The original proposal is at 16%, for a jarring 84% disapproval rate.
Despite overwhelming negative feedback, Red Hat is currently drafting a revised proposal.
But what about Red Hat?
This is the link to the proposal: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Telemetry#Privacy-preserving_Telemetry_for_Fedora_Workstation
These parts are all interesting and contradict some people who argue Red Hat has no hand in this issue:
Name: Michael Catanzaro Email: <mcatanzaro@redhat.com>
and
The Red Hat Display Systems Team (which develops the desktop) proposes to enable limited data collection of anonymous Fedora Workstation usage metrics.
and
It is Fedora Legal’s obligation to ensure our data collection complies with legal requirements in the jurisdictions in which Red Hat operates
and
Occasionally, Red Hat might need to collect specific metrics to justify additional time spent on contributing to Fedora or additional investment in Fedora.
The quotes above were handpicked. There are 7 matches for “Red Hat” in the link above, not counting the email address.
Let me put it this way. I’m a linux software engineer with 20+ years of experience and my experience with open source projects is this: If you aren’t dedicated enough to fill out a bug report or help me help you with issues… I don’t want to know your situation. If that means you don’t use my software / solutions, fine… move on. The only time this is different is as I said, when a company wants to sell data or be able to mine for patterns that would help them monetize the product more.
Furthermore, I think you just don’t realize that Fedora has been doing fine for 20-ish years (?), and they haven’t needed this data previously; so why now? I don’t buy the, “it would help us focus on which packages to maintain” argument because that is what flatpak is suppose to help with by pushing the package maintenance back on the developers or a separate entity of maintainers. They don’t need to cater to simple users like new Linux converts because Fedora is simply not aligned with those principles! Fedora has always been Security and Free OSS focused because it makes for a great base for RHEL. Red Hat doesn’t need to strip out or worry about licensing issues because its done by Fedora; likewise, they don’t need to worry about security because its done by Fedora. They just have to make sure they don’t disrupt it… and thats why they want this telemetry in Fedora, same reason.
Which means you’re only listening to the people who are technically inclined. That’s a lot more siloed than you realize and leads to UX that really isn’t suitable for anything beyond the IT department. Maybe that’s your thing, but frankly, I’d like to see Linux expand beyond the datacenter and beyond the 2% of gamers.
Again, that’s siloed thinking. It’s perfectly fine…for the Linux space, but frankly I think every single distro genuinely needs more usability data because the UX really isn’t great in a lot of ways, and I say this as a Linux enthusiast of 15 years and a software dev myself. Doing fine is the status quo.
No, it means I’m only listening to people that want to help. There are plenty of bug reports filed by new to linux individuals all the time, but they need to make the first step of seeking help; after all, Linux engineers are often not paid for their contributions… this isn’t MS and Windows, or Canonical and Ubuntu.
Not siloed thinking at all, its the nature of the beast; its why open source / Linux in general has not dominated the desktop space, because there is no corporation behind it paying engineers to work on it to cater to those that don’t want to help. I’ve always said that open source / Linux’s greatest asset is its greatest weakness… and this is a prime example.