You are misinterpreting my point. I don’t want FRH to have my data and I don’t want them approximating me or my data. For example, there is no accurate way to quantify the size of the Linux community or the number of Linux installs. Website and browser stats, download stats, system update/upgrade stats, the Steam hardware survey, the count of people who are members of the official forum, the Fedora subreddit, the number of people who attend conventions, even when taken all together still would not provide a number that is even close to reliable. However, many entities will attempt to use the above sources and others to estimate the size of the community and count of installs. With that estimation, opinions, decisions, and justifications will be made. I would like to keep the size of the Linux community and the number of Linux installs, across all distros. obscure. This keeps those opinions, decisions, and justifications, in the false, invalid, and unreliable category. I don’t want corporate entities sizing up the community, in order to develop a strategy to turn the community into a glorified cash cow. The Linux community is not and does not behave like a market. So any reference to “market share” will be false/unreliable. Let’s leave “market share” to those license and EULA driven products such as Windows 10. If even half of the community could be estimated and reliably treated as a market then the other 50% aren’t far behind. No thank you. This is why I don’t want the law of large numbers applied to data collection on Linux.
This isn’t about catering to just my needs/feedback. There is nothing good going to come from automated data collection schemes on Linux. Win 10 and Android, are poster children examples of what happens when data collection is wide spread. I don’t want to contribute to some investor or corporate entity getting rich off of me. I do not want to be a proverbial cow to be milked.
I’ve explained this in my post. The list that I put together, I’ve used in a development project for a prior employer. It was very reliable for identifying individual devices no matter where the device was moved to within the company.
I’ve already explained the falsity of this. You are making an assumption. I’ve already been down this path many times while working on a dev team. Structured data provides efficiency to devs but does not guarantee quality improvements. Survey data post release cycles confirmed this.
I have friends and family members who worked for IBM in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. IBM isn’t new to me. Neither is for-profit corporate greed. I well versed in the game of misdirect and mislead customers for the sake of getting greater access and thus more $$$$$. You can not snow a Snowman. I carry a dual M.S. in Wind and Blizzard-cology, and Precipitology.
Yes there are concerns. I’ve already explained this. I have no desire to use an Android like system on my desktop that collects my data. No, I don’t want the collection components on my disk; not even dormant. I don’t want to have to turn it off and at some point in the future it becomes 10, 20, 30. 50 switches that need to be turned off. See Win10’s settings app. across successive Win10 version. No thank you.
Lastly, if I were interested in my data being collected I would just:
- install the Endless OS distro., or
- use Win10
No thank you. Data collection like Android or some other data collection platform, with or with opt-in/out schemes are not desired or helpful. I’m not interested in participating in such schemes.
I’m a Computer Science/Mathematics major. With real world experience dealing with code, other devs, middle managers, end users who were internal and external customers, and difficult/demanding executives of varying degrees of technical know-how.
I have an idea. How about they put all this data collection into RHEL and see how that works out with their corporate customers.