Asklemmy

For me, yeah, I think it's immoral. Other devs? They can do what they want; it's their work, and if I'm not giving them money, whining about it is just being a choosy begger. I ask only that people be up-front with their trackers, so I can factor it into a decision to use or move on.

I won't put trackers in my code for advertisement, because I believe ads are inherently bad for society. I might put analytics in for design decisions... like, how many people actually use feature X? Where should I focus my development attention? The noisiest complainers about some feature do not always represent the majority, and analytics can help. However, in nearly none of what I code is other people's concerns a high priority. My FOSS code is to scratch my own itch, and by giving it away gratis I free myself of any obligation to people. The only caveat is if I get a message from someone who's using my code, who wrote code that I use. In those rare cases, I do feel a sense of obligation born of cameraderie. I'd feel the same way if the music artist WMRI, or one of the members of the bad The Skins wrote me and asked for some feature. I've paid for their stuff, but they published it "pay what you think it's worth," with no minumum, which is IMO a pretty decent model.

If only the world wasn't full of mostly leechers, socialism might actually work. But, yeah... that's my long-winded response to your question.