2019-10-29 UPDATE: The following email is going out to all GitLab users:

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. 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

Update 10/25: We have opened this issue for further discussion on this topic. Please direct your feedback there: gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com#5672

Update 10/24/19: We've heard your concerns and questions and have rolled back any changes to our Terms of Service. We’re going to process the feedback and rethink our approach. We will not activate user level product usage tracking on GitLab.com or GitLab self-managed before we address the feedback and re-evaluate our plan. We will make sure to communicate our proposed changes prior to any changes to GitLab.com or self-managed instances, and give sufficient time for people to provide feedback for a new proposal. We'll work in this issue.

Here's an MR updating our blog post accordingly: gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!33289 (diffs, comment 235139590)

Email sent by GitLab to GitLab.com users

Dear GitLab User,

We have launched important updates to our Terms of Service surrounding our use of telemetry services. Starting with GitLab 12.4, existing customers who use our proprietary products (that is, GitLab.com and the Enterprise Edition of our self-managed offerings) may notice additional Javascript snippets that will interact with GitLab and/or third-party SaaS telemetry service (such as Pendo).

For GitLab.com users: as we roll out this update you will be prompted to accept our new Terms of Service. Until the new Terms are accepted access to the web interface and API will be blocked. So, for users who have integrations with our API this will cause a brief pause in service via our API until the terms have been accepted by signing in to the web interface.

For Self-managed users: GitLab Core will continue to be free software with no changes. If you want to install your own instance of GitLab without the proprietary software being introduced as a result of this change, GitLab Community Edition (CE) remains a great option. It is licensed under the MIT license (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License) and will contain no proprietary software. Many open source software projects use GitLab CE for their SCM and CI needs. Again, there will be no changes to GitLab CE.

Key Updates:

GitLab.com (GitLab’s SaaS offering)and GitLab'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(https://www.pendo.io)).

We will disclose all such usage in our privacy 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 we will aim for SOC2 compliance. Pendo is SOC2 compliant.

If you have any questions please contact us at [email protected]

Thank you,

GitLab Team

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