On May 14, 2007, at 2:28 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
I see! Well, that's two people vehemently opposed so far. :)
Interesting.
For comparison, it's far from unprecedented for programs to send
statistical information to their developers when they check for
updates. The popular text editors BBEdit and TextWrangler from Bare
Bones Software do this, for example, as does the venerable dock
utility DragThing. As I recall, they all ask for the user's
permission before doing so, and explain exactly what data is sent;
we could do that too. Even Software Update sends Apple a list of
the Apple software you have installed, so that it can deliver to
you a list of applicable updates. And it does that without your
permission, and it's on by default, too.
Yeah, but still, this is a calculated risk for an open source project
to take. People have a hard enough time with software phoning home
that's also presumably commercially vetted (and released by people
who can also presumably get sued if it does something really
egregious), but the wild and wooly open source stuff doesn't get much
benefit of the doubt there at all.
I think a far better idea, and one which kills a lot more avians with
a single projectile, is to focus on creating packaged software for
MacPorts and a nice GUI interface for downloading it, then simply
track the download stats (which everybody and their dog does) and
that will give you a REAL notion of what's truly popular and what's not.
Right now, all your stats would be measuring is the activity of a
relatively small collection of geeks who know enough to install the
dev tools, run Terminal.app and use the port(1) command line tool.
This may seem like a relatively large and meaningful number of people
if you're judging solely based on a focused sampling of macports
traffic, but in reality it's just a wee tiny drop in the bucket when
compared to the overall, pent-up demand for add-on software for the Mac.
No offense, but your stats would literally be about as meaningful as
taking an election poll in Joplin, Missouri and announcing the
results on CNN.
- Jordan
_______________________________________________
macports-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
