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.