We apologize and have rolled back the changes announced in our October 23 email

[GitLab Team]

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


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