Today I ran a quick brew update, and noticed the following:
==> Homebrew has enabled anonymous aggregate user behaviour analytics
Read the analytics documentation (and how to opt-out) here:
https://git.io/brew-analytics
Updated Homebrew from to .
Updated 2 taps (caskroom/cask, homebrew/core).
No changes to formulae.
Its well worth reading the document: Homebrew’s Anonymous Aggregate User Behaviour Analytics.
I’m in support of this move, after all Homebrew is valuable for me, and the volunteers need to know where to place importance of their time. I guess its also important to know if they should support many versions of OS X (as of this writing, I am still running OS X 10.10 instead of having upgraded).
Being non-server software, this is turned on by default. Imagine if we could do that with MariaDB Server and the feedback plugin? Its opt-in, and you don’t get statistics that “match reality” so to speak. E.g. some 12k servers out there, or how 88% of users are using Microsoft Windows. This number is wildly different from the quoted 12 million users in a recent press release.
Opensource projects, especially venture backed opensource projects/products, are always looking for metrics and usage statistics. The old adage at MySQL was that you were a user for about 3 years, before you even bought services. Its clear that we all need better metrics instead of download numbers. Kudos to Homebrew for being so brave.