Four years ago, there was aguest blog post and discussion about free software and GitLab. That discussion has continued to inform GitLab’s free software philosophy for years and has served as a guiding light for making decisions on how we strike an appropriate balance in ouropen corestrategy. On one hand, wevalue resultsand we believe an open core model is the best path to achieve that. It also means making our products better as fast as possible for our customers and users. On the other hand, we want to make sure that users who prefer using only free software can have a positive GitLab experience, as open source communities are important to GitLab.
To make GitLab better faster, we need more data on how users are using GitLab. SaaS telemetry products, which provide analytics on user behavior inside web-based applications, have come a long way in the past few years. They are an important tool for rapidly improving user experiences because you can understand what users are doing (or not doing) in the app. GitLab has a lot of features, and a lot of users, and it is time that we use telemetry to get the data we need for our product managers to improve the experience.
Most of these tools use JavaScript snippets (similar to Google Analytics) that execute in the user’s browser and send information back to the telemetry service. While there are open source options, the leading commercial telemetry solutions often use proprietary JavaScript snippets. For a majority of users, disclosure of JavaScript usage in a privacy policy, along with describing how we are going to use the data, may be sufficient. But we also recognize that users who prefer only free software may have concerns.
So, we are planning some changes that I will describe below. But rest assured, a very important thing is not changing:GitLab Community Editionwill continue to be free software with no changes. If you want to install your own instance of GitLab without proprietary software, GitLab Community Edition (CE) remains a great option, as it is licensed under the MIT License. Many open source software projects use GitLab CE for their SCM and CI needs, and nothing is changing with GitLab CE.
Planned changes
GitLab.com (GitLab’s SaaS offering)andGitLab’s proprietary Self- Managed packages (Starter, Premium, and Ultimate)will now include additional Javascript snippets (both open source and proprietary) that will interact with both GitLab and possibly third-party SaaS telemetry services (we will be using Pendo) . We will disclose all such usage in ourprivacy policy, as well as what we are using the data for. We will also ensure that any third-party telemetry service we use will have data protection standards at least as strong as GitLab, and will aim for SOC2 compliance (Pendo is SOC2 compliant).
In order to service the needs of GitLab.com and GitLab Self-Managed users who do not want to be tracked, both GitLab.com and GitLab Self-Managed will honor theDo Not Track (DNT)mechanism in web browsers. This means that, if you turn on Do Not Track in your browser, GitLab will not load the JavaScript snippet. The only downside to this is that users may also not get the benefit of in-app messaging or guides that some third-party telemetry tools have that would require the JavaScript snippet. Overall, we believe these changes will continue to help us achieve results in improving our product experience for users, while also giving choice to users who only want free software. Please let us know your thoughts.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings