David Gerard
the Go maintainers are now claiming that objectors to Google's opt-out telemetry proposal on the Go compiler - yes, really - are arguing in bad faith and violating the Code of Conduct, and their comments are getting hidden. well done lads, you just keep doing that as hard as possible. i'm sure it'll work out great. 158 comments
Nemo_bis 🌈
@adversary Indeed. Such codes of conduct are designed to ensure that a central power structure (usually a corporation) has total and unappealable control on the project and can use such power with minimal review. In the case of #Golang, ultimate power on any conflict is given to Google's OSPO (whoever that is now that Chris DiBona has been laid off).
@pndc
@davidgerard It's probably time to just treat Go as malware at this point. It had little merit to start with.
jakob reading solarpunk
@davidgerard This is just ridiculous. If your license says your software is "PROVIDED AS IS" without "FITNESS FOR 
Bálint Szilakszi
@davidgerard reminds me i really need to finish migrating off gmail, this company is on a steep decline 
steve mookie kong 🐰
I'm sure developers will start to Go to a different language. Or maybe Go fork the code. Ok, I'll stop now.  
Wayne Dixon
@davidgerard how long before someone forks “Go” into a language that is the exact same except strips the telemetry out. Naturally, the name would have to be either “Stop” or “Caution”.
Sean T. McBeth 🍻
@davidgerard how did the software industry survive before telemetry? The way these companies make it sound, they'd be out on the street with their hats in their hands if they couldn't phone home. 
Vertigo #$FF
@seanmcbeth @davidgerard They relied heavily on such medieval techniques as maintaining customer support staff, user surveys, keeping an eye on outside support channels, etc. But, we are in the renny-seance period now, so companies are better than that. All hail Big Data. Don't forget to rub Big Table's belly for good luck.
Orangestar :apartyblobcat:
@seanmcbeth IIRC, aggressive registration cards. Telemetry just made that easier. 
wakingrufus
@davidgerard
Lucian Boboc
@davidgerard probably is hard for people that have large codebases in Go to just migrate to something else but they will lose all potential new Go developers 😅 
flere-imsaho
@davidgerard the github issue, in the best passive-aggressive style, is now locked – out of care for everyone's productive weekend.
Arquinsiel Teknogrot
@mawhrin @davidgerard At least he very politely gives you an email address to point out that when ignoring criticism is too hard just shuting down debate doesn't make criticism go away to him. 
Hans van Zijst
"Don't be evil"
I wonder if Google folks still remember that slogan. I think they don't. 
Csepp 🌢
@gewalker @davidgerard How is the Amazon influence situation with Rust? There was quite a big kerfuffle about it somewhat recently.
Csepp 🌢
@davidgerard @gewalker Amazon causes way more environmental and social issues than cryptocurrencies, not that I'm a fan of most cryptocurrencies. I wouldn't be surprised if they also provided infrastructure for Palantir.
Csepp 🌢
@davidgerard @gewalker 
Adrian Cochrane
@davidgerard From their discussions, I gather the accusation is that most of the objectors don't actually have a stake in Go. I'm sure there's some truth to this, but at the same time I anecdotally see some objectors who do use Go. Not everyone who has a stake engages when they're happy with how the project's going, so determining to what degree that accusation is true is extremely difficult.
flere-imsaho
@alcinnz @davidgerard i might not have a stake in go directly, but i will sure as hell discourage anyone who asks from using it for future projects (if this passes).
Adrian Cochrane
@mawhrin @davidgerard Personally Go was never my taste in language... They advertised themselves on their elegant design, but they don't strike me as anything special there. And they have some of the same footguns as C.
Klampfradler 🎸🚴
@mawhrin @alcinnz @davidgerard Also if it doesn't pass. Look closely. The whole ecosystem is entirely, well, Google.
Adrian Cochrane
@Natureshadow @mawhrin @davidgerard There is a lot of nice networking software written in Go... For some reason or other... I do use some of it!
flere-imsaho
@alcinnz @Natureshadow @davidgerard and my favourite ansible secret storage backend (gopass). anyways, the company i work for depends on google's existence, so i'm not going to go all righteous on all google products. but i can grumble re: technical choices in a limited field, and i will, and there's a limited chance it could've been heard.
Klampfradler 🎸🚴
@mawhrin @alcinnz @davidgerard I never got the point of gopass. I mean, it's just pass, rewritten for no reason at all with no benefits at all.
Klampfradler 🎸🚴
@alcinnz @mawhrin @davidgerard I do as well. Seems I need to stop. (Although as a fun fact, a long-standing network bug is actually something else that drives me away from Go... https://github.com/golang/go/issues/52341 has put an important project on hold here, and now I will just rewrite in Rust instead 🤷) 
Harald Eilertsen
@Adrian Cochrane The thing is that a lot of software written in Go will be deployed using the Go toolchain. As a sysadmin or regular user that just happens to install the occasional app using Go, I'm probably less inclined to even be aware there's something to opt out from.
Björn Lindström
@alcinnz @davidgerard I had just kind of gotten around to accepting a plan to start a rewrite in Go at my day job. The alternative is C# and I had just barely been convinced that Go was the least nasty alternative, when this happened. That said I still think Go seems more likely to survive as an open source fork than C# if/when the company abandons it, so it may still be the alternative that's the least likely to be a waste of time to learn here ...
Adrian Cochrane
@bkhl @davidgerard I hear GCC already has a Go compiler... It can be hard for them to keep up with the "move fast & break things" mentality of a lot modern languages, but that certainly helps!
Orangestar :apartyblobcat:
@alcinnz @davidgerard By that argument the only people with a "stake" in the Go compiler are the people developing Go. That's not why you would make an issue like that public.
Adrian Cochrane
@orangestar @davidgerard I do believe they count people using the Go compiler as stakeholders, the people from whom their collecting (minimal) analytics, the people writing Go code.
Orangestar :apartyblobcat:
@alcinnz I understand this sentiment but meant it more like "This is what that sentiment can be inadvertently boiled down to if you took it the wrong way."
hko 😷
@davidgerard could someone provide links to the specific comments in question? i just tried to see what's going on in https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409, but it's not obvious to me how to find anything efficiently in the github.com UI
dr2chase
@hko @davidgerard Hard to search, though. 
Helle (@ CCC Camp 📞 4355)
@davidgerard guess the language really was designed to just by used by Google as it has always felt to me. 
R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:
DANG. 
Esther Payne 🏴
@RL_Dane yeah... I think that folks who use go and do care about their privacy need to have a think about where go figures in their future. Although for some projects who have chosen to write them in go, they won't be able to stop. There's limited pressure that can be put on google. it's a large Corp, known for #massdatacollection. For every coder that stops, others won't. I'm glad my project isn't in that position. But other projects are. Faustian bargain indeed.
R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:
The thing that's been concerning me is the incessant hardware and software treadmill that's been established. Not only are applications constantly moving targets, but also operating systems and NOW programming languages as well. The more we pivot into the total fly-by-night, seat-of-your-pants kind of architecture, the more we are ONE good solar flare away from total societal collapse -- and I'm usually NOT that kind of a doom-and-gloomer. 
Scott Williams 🐧
@RL_Dane @davidgerard @onepict #telemetry like this should always be an opt-in thing. I'm curious if this is actually legal in the EU or in California? Seems like it might fly in the face of CCPA or GDPR.
David Gerard
@vwbusguy this is a question that is being asked, and being hidden. the answer per the letter of the law in both jurisdictions is "lol hell no."
Scott Williams 🐧
@davidgerard The implementation could get particularly interesting since #Google is a #California company and definitely falls under the #CCPA. #IANAL 
Oblomov
@davidgerard That telemetry information is going to be so very useful when everybody drops go like a hot potato or switches to alternative back- and front-ends. Community fork without telemetry when? 
Louis :emacs:
@hellvolution @davidgerard There is a GNU Go actually: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.8.4/gccgo/ But, old. 
f.rift :fire_blue:
@davidgerard are they trying to pull a raspi? because that's how you pull a raspi... 
David Gerard
@requiem and yet, in most cases, it's been 0% weird e.g. the Google employee who was vociferously defending the last Mastodon scraper against the fediverse meanies 
David Collantes
@davidgerard if it was this one, https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409#discussioncomment-4939670, I think the reply was on target. Though it is marked as spam—it is pretty borderline—it can still be seeing.
David Collantes
@davidgerard I agree it is a controversial topic. The hidden comments I came across don’t add value to the discussion, though. I get strong feelings/beliefs are at play, but “Duck Google. No telemetry.” isn’t the best way to make a case. Plenty of off topic comments too because they are, really, off topic. If anything, this proves that GitHub issues/discussions are not the best place to carry out this kind of discourse.
Louis :emacs:
@davidgerard So what would be a good replacement language for all my web backend stuff? C, Common Lisp, Rust? 
mirabilos
@davidgerard what the everlasting fuck?! Google types are showing their true face now, apparently…
oxyhyxo
@davidgerard ugh. People really need to stop enabling the business development/marketing folks
Douglas Camata
@davidgerard I believe this will end up being the worst community PR disaster in the Go ecosystem for a while. More and more I think that we need to free the "cloud native" software from the practical monopoly of Go and introduce/encourage the use of different programming languages. 
The Doctor
@davidgerard That took longer than expected. Guess they're too busy looking over their shoulders for the next round of layoffs.
DELETED
@davidgerard maybe by 'arguing in bad faith' they hinted at the outright doomed fate of any hopes people might have in this language. They're en route to global domination and your arguments for ethical design go against their morbid plan, which they might mistake for bad faith. Just ditch their wares and LYAHFGG or some other nifty thing. 
Cybarbie
It will have to be opt-out, data is toxic now, GDPR et al. Then they will only get telemetry from people who want telemetry, a.k.a. morons. 
JdeBP
It's not just a code of conduct that is being used as a weak excuse. A quick scan of https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409 reveals egregious abuse of "spam", for things which by no reasonable definition are unsolicited bulk messages. One person was marked as "spam", for example, for saying that xe thought this as wrongheaded in Go as it was for .NET and objected to it in both for the same reasons.
snaums
@davidgerard *curseword*. I really liked Go. And I'd quite like to read the full story on that, and how gcc-go is affected. |
Gregory's Server
@davidgerard let me guess, they're using a variant of the Contributor Covenant to do that. It's real good for suppressing people, it's what it was made for.