Re: Forge Software Evaluation by FSF

[David Kastrup]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 11:06 PM David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> > There is also a bunch of verbiage about how tracking tags are evil.
>> > (lilypond.org has been running Google Analytics for 15 years or so).
>>
>> Because?
>
> We used it to improve our site layout and understand how people
> discovered LilyPond, so we could improve our marketing.

Some examples?  The problem is that by now tracking everybody has become
a pervasive and lucrative business that, due to data mining, makes it
almost impossible not to be permanently identified with a profile.  That
is a great help for repressive governments among other things.

> It's also useful for tracking downloads.

But for that it is not necessary to know the IP addresses.  And we
likely don't.  But employing Google's services here means that they do.
And Google did retire its "Do no evil" motto a few years ago without
much of a fanfare.

Now in connection with us still using Rietveld and having used Google
Code, this looks like at best a minor problem.  On the other hand, they
tend to work a whole lot less for profiling a wide range of people than
our main website would.

If we contribute to tracking down and jailing Chinese users who looked
at LilyPond for creating protest songs, that would be nothing to be
particularly proud of.

> We recently discussed the PDF manual, and if it makes sense to add the
> download size. If we'd annotate the link, we could easily see how
> often people download the manual, and whether it's worth time
> tinkering with it.

We don't offer downloads just for the PDF notation manual.  And we don't
see how an advertised download size influences download decisions.  If
we want to maximise downloads, we should probably remove all size
indications and have users hit their limits.  I think of the objective
more to provide a courtesy rather than maximize web traffic.

>> > I suggest to focus on the needs of our project, rather than the
>> > edicts of RMS.
>>
>> The FSF is not the "edicts of RMS" and it wasn't reduced to that
>> while he was president, either.  They are to a good degree in the
>> business of caring about details that are easily lost in complacency.
>> There is a value in that.  After all, our whole planet is slated for
>> extinction through complacency by now.
>>
>> So I see no point in not trying to evaluate the feedback they bother
>> to provide.  Whether we are realistically in a position to make our
>> project adopt it is a different question, but I see no point in
>> ignoring it.
>
> I am worried that having too many criteria will get us stuck in
> analysis-paralysis, which would leave in the state where we are
> currently, because we can't make up our minds.

We are currently in my book focusing on getting the current releases
out.  There is no point in switching while this is not finished since we
want to be able to deal with the release fallout without adding more
workload for the constant volunteers keeping our things running.  I am
grateful for a few people preevaluating our options: that gives us more
of a plan of what to try out in more seriousness once the time for doing
that is right.  There is still a large amount of catchup going on with
the translations group, with Italian and Spanish translations rushing to
the finishing line where they can be called complete.  And moving to
translating unstable will also be a large piece of work.  I don't want
to switch tools from underneath the translators while they are doing
incredibly heavy lifting.

But there is nothing wrong with developers starting to look at options
and see what a more serious evaluation would entail.  That's preparation
for making up our minds.  There will come a time when we want to get
down to a final list of options, and if it is more than one, seriously
evaluate them (including a non-trivial number of people doing business
there and getting a hang of it) and then pick one for longer.

-- 
David Kastrup
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