Telemetry in Godot Engine

I have found this funny tweet by Juan Linietsky, the lead developer of Godot, just some months ago.

One thing that I never understood as a Linux user since the 90s: People buy their own computers, it's their property, so why are they so accepting today of using software that runs locally, but then forces them to login and send telemetry [emphasis mine] in order to work and do anything ?

I appreciate the way you all are discussing the potential benefits of opt-in telemetry in Godot! Who knows, maybe the developers will take note of your feedback, assuming that they are monitoring these forums. That being said, it's uncertain whether they are actively monitoring these forums or not. Nevertheless, they do appear to gather certain statistics to demonstrate the extent of Godot's adoption according to Juan's two-year-old tweet. At the same, it's kind of weird that he finds it necessary to explicitly state that they don't use any sort of telemetry:

Despite this, as a co-author of Godot, if you all find opt-in telemetry to be particularly useful, especially considering the recent productive discussion on telemetry as delivered by Clay John, I genuinely encourage you to put together a proposal regarding telemetry if you have any concrete use cases in mind. Alternatively, you could start an open-ended discussion on this topic. This would help the core developers better understand how to incorporate such a feature effectively.

synthnostate Who? I presume he's one of them

Sure, as I said, Clay John is an official member of Godot PLC, see Governance page at Godot's official website. They represent The Board of Directors. Everyone you see listed there should be treated as an official representative of Godot. He also works at for-profit W4 Games founded by Juan Linietsky (lead developer of Godot) and others, according to information from Godot Foundation.

So, if I were you, I'd treat the information provided by Clay John thoughtfully. Considering that W4 Games specializes in providing online services for Godot, the topic of telemetry makes sense in this context.

synthnostate Contrary to OP's implication, Clay John is clearly NOT advocating for telemetry.

This is your implication, not mine. Please don't put your words into my mouth. The quote is self-sufficient to indicate that the leadership had a productive discussion about some light, opt-in telemetry, nothing more. If you expect them to write an official announcement about such a decision, they likely won't do so, as they have learned from Audacity's case, where the community expressed extreme disapproval against telemetry in any form.

So yes, the question becomes why Clay John had to say this in the first place, which led me to the idea that they might be adding telemetry to future products by W4 Games, such as the recently announced W4 Consoles. In either case, W4 does plan to provide matchmaking services that may necessitate adding telemetry.

In either case, please recognize the difference between words vs actions. The question is how they're going to balance corporate needs vs open-source needs. Another company co-founded by Godot's leadership is Ramatak. If you read their first blog post:

Since talk is cheap we set up Ramatak Inc. as a “Public benefits company”. For Ramatak this means that we will not be allowed to, for instance, “take back” contributions by making a piece of code we once released under an open source license proprietary in the future. In this way we feel that we can be a trustworthy member of the community.

The credibility of all these assurances is well known. Godot leadership can be trusted. You don't have to worry about them operating all these for-profit companies behind your back.

synthnostate Xrayez This is your implication, not mine. Please don't put your words into my mouth. The quote is self-sufficient to indicate...

No, you took that quote out of context.

Your incomplete quote of what I said could be considered out of context under a similar interpretation. But as you see, I don't blame you for quoting me out of context, because I understand the nature of Godot's community by now.

What I've noticed is that in Godot community, everything is labeled out of context whenever quoting is utilized to expose questionable decisions...

This is actually a typical behavior when people stumble upon conflicting information that creates cognitive dissonance, as they try to reconcile their initial expectations and beliefs with reality.