I recently stumbled upon this thread, because as someone passionate about privacy, the title caught my eye.
I also wanted to control what Syncthing communicates to third-party systems and with the settings and documentation offered, I found it quite easy to understand what is sent where and for what purpose and whether I want or need that. It took me less time to figure that out (and thereby see that the project is trustworthy) than it must have taken to make this thread.
The attitude and tone displayed by the original poster is absolutely appaling. I have been using Syncthing since the very beginning and it is without a doubt in the top 5 of most important applications I have ever used. If I ever find the time or motivation to contribute to more open source software, this project would be at the top of my list. Absolutely brilliant and invaluable software, my sincerest thanks to @calmh and the team for making it.
I think if you use any secure tunnel software, with end to end encryption, you can feel safer. I’m not sure if an SSH tunnel would work because of router NAT issues. There are other free options for creating a private LAN over the Internet. Radmin is a free solution that might help. I’ve never actually tried to use it, but the concept is sound.
a) If people stop being nice to each other on a forum like this, who would have any incentive to contribute to the community, let alone work on the project? For many people contributing to OSS, the feeling of doing something nice is the only reward they get. Implying bad work or bad intent as a new user is clearly rude in this context.
b) It gave the lead developer of this project a chance to show his side of the story, which is much more serious than just somebody being rude (as it is a criminal offense). But in both cases somebody shows inappropriate behavior exploiting the anonymity the internet with fake identities and/ or alternative usernames that one would not get away with in real life.
c) You posting in this thread (+pulling it back up after 3 days) kind of disproves your statement already, as you yourself could obviously not let this slide.
But you are right, the thread deserves to be closed.
The idea is that as a first responder (issue triager if this were a bug tracker), you presume innocent until proven guilty, in the sense that the first ‘shot’ is mostly given a pass.
If you get a less than stellar response even after that, then you can happily conclude that the complaint was done in bad faith.
But in my experience as a maintainer, the bad faith cases are usually rare. There are so many other possible factors, like language issues, instantaneous frustration, lack of familiarity with the software, etc., which only come out in further conversation.
The only “maintainer” in this thread is me. The only pushback the original poster got for their attitude was one very polite sentence in the first reply, prefacing a factual answer to their query. Then several more factual replies happened, and then they decided to argue the attitude point instead of taking that at good faith and leaving it at a “yeah, sorry about that, let’s discuss the actual facts”.
At this point the thread is apparently some sort of meta discussion about the arguing. I think it’s served it’s purpose, at least I’m tired of seeing it.
