Paywall workaround?

Is this supposed to read "misunderstands"? And if not, could you elaborate?

An email is being sent right now, but emailing at scale... takes time:

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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

You may or may not agree with that comment, but it is not nasty. What is nasty, on the other hand, is the vitriolic reaction to it. So far I count 16 "middle finger" emojis, including one with the subtitle "incompentent or malicious CFO". In what world does a disagreement over the right level of telemetry justify this kind of behavior?

It's mind-boggling to me how entitled and aggressive the open-source culture is allowed to be. Does a company like Gitlab really deserve to have its employees publicly insulted in this way, after giving away so much to their users, for free, and being so much more transparent than 99% of tech companies?

At this point I don't understand why anyone in their right mind would go to the trouble of making their product open-source. It's just not worth it.

Sadly, not having pull requests, HTML mail and issue tracker is an absolute deal breaker for me, I rely on those for being productive. Otherwise, it's positive to hear that there is some profit made.

How did you get first users to sign up on SH?

Cool. Those are definitely useful and interesting. I don’t think I’ve been enough of a GitX power user to need some of those yet, but I’m sure the day will come. I appreciate the no JavaScript these days! I like rich UI’s but I appreciate the minimalism and trying to do cool stuff with just HTML and css.

How were you inspired to tackle this particular project?