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I received an Email directly from GitLab. It's an apology from the CEO.
Dear GitLab users and customers,
On October 23, we sent an email entitled "Important Updates to our Terms of Service and Telemetry Services" announcing upcoming changes. Based on considerable feedback from our customers, users, and the broader community, we reversed course the next day and removed those changes before they went into effect. Further, GitLab will commit to not implementing telemetry in our products that sends usage data to a third-party product analytics service. This clearly struck a nerve with our community and I apologize for this mistake.
So, what happened? In an effort to improve our user experience, we decided to implement user behavior tracking with both first and third-party technology. Clearly, our evaluation and communication processes for rolling out a change like this were lacking and we need to improve those processes. But that's not the main thing we did wrong.
Our main mistake was that we did not live up to our own core value of collaboration by including our users, contributors, and customers in the strategy discussion and, for that, I am truly sorry. It shouldn't have surprised us that you have strong feelings about opt-in/opt-out decisions, first versus third-party tracking, data protection, security, deployment flexibility and many other topics, and we should have listened first.
So, where do we go from here? The first step is a retrospective that is happening on October 29 to document what went wrong. We are reaching out to customers who expressed concerns and collecting feedback from users and the wider community. We will put together a new proposal for improving the user experience and share it for feedback. We made a mistake by not collaborating, so now we will take as much time as needed to make sure we get this right. You can be part of the collaboration by posting comments in this issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5672. If you are a customer, you may also reach out to your GitLab representative if you have additional feedback.
I am glad you hold GitLab to a higher standard. If we are going to be transparent and collaborative, we need to do it consistently and learn from our mistakes.
Sincerely,
Sid Sijbrandij
Co-Founder and CEO
GitLab
I think the comments in the link given speaks for itself. My best guess is they realized they would lose a lot of (all?) GitLab customers in Europe due to the data protections laws we have here.
-- Common Joe
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Debvgger on Wednesday October 30 2019, @10:14AM (4 children)
Ok, I didn't know about their plans to spy on users. But now, what I know is that I'll never use or even try their services.
They could be cashing big on the lack of trust many people have in Github after Microsoft bought it, even more now that we get to slowly know about projects being censored, confirming the fears about the owner.
Then they go and perform a "Microsoft".
How can anyone be that dumb, is something that really escapes me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2019, @10:22AM (1 child)
Last one: https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns/blob/master/Spain/2019/2019-10-23-GuardiaCivil.md [github.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2019, @10:25AM
So now we can't either trust GitHub or GitLab.
Fuck both.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isj on Wednesday October 30 2019, @04:41PM (1 child)
Well, the alternatives aren't great either:
github: Too big, using them will encourage a monoculture. They also seem to let their opinion affect what can be hosted there. If they tried to make all the repositories adopt a CoC that requires you to be vegan/black/lbgt, then I wouldn't be that surprised. They also use a whitelist in robots.txt preventing new search engines from crawling even project descriptions.
bitbucket(atlassian): slow interface, deprecates old browsers way too soon. Even paid accounts get annoying popups advertising their other services / extended subscriptions, and the "no-thanks" button doesn't work.
self-hosted: All the joy. All the pain.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2019, @10:59PM
Well, there is SourceForge, Savannah, OSDN, Launchpad, Assembla, YouTrack, UserSnap, Project Locker, Cloudforge, Notabug, and I could go on.