Friend, please listen to reason.
The “code” you linked to is not functional code of any sort. Not to be nitpicky, it’s just an HTML image tag, so its Markup at best. All you did was stop the loading of an SVG image. The fact that they source it from their own domain tells you everything: they have a script that runs to check the current number of stars, then generates this image that reflects. It’s really standard.
All your other points you’re making because you do not have much experience in the software realm, which I’m not saying to be dismissive or anything like at all, I’m simply illustrating that all the points you’re questioning or mentioning are 100% standard.
- you don’t make a fork for three lines of code and ask others to “check it out”. If anything, just point out the issue and post a diff or a script to fix it. Simple.
- They have a pro version, and are using images they generate in a template viewed by users to promote its popularity and try to sell pro. They’re running a business out of this. Not every FOSS project is non-profit, and these people are simply trying to sell a product AS WELL as keep it open source for others to enjoy, like yourself. Feel lucky to have the privilege they are letting you use it for free.
- The term “phoning home” as you’re trying to use it, is wrong. You’re implying that it is functionally doing something unexpected. It is not. It is sourcing an image in HTML. The suspicious type of phoning home is code that executes locally and pulls down other functional bits of code that alter the way the software APPEARS to be used. It’s a way of obfuscating something shady, like a virus, or malware. This is not that kind of code.
- If your concern is simply that the code you’ve run is sourcing an image from somewhere, I can only imagine how upset you’ll be to learn that software repos of this size are pulling things from dozens, if not hundreds of places. This project pulls from rubygems, yarnpkgs, and the dreaded example.com.
- Lastly, the reason that team responded to you in that manner was more that they were taken aback. Like “WTF is this person talking about? I don’t get it.” Realize that they were nice enough to respond, where most project maintainers would just ignore or close the issue.
Also, you might want to freak out about the social badges being sourced in this as well.
coffee_chum@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Just to play devils advocate for a minute- Loading from their own domain means they can actually garner quite a bit of information from just the serving of the svg:
Date/time/IP are good enough for getting pretty good estimates of who all uses their software. Doesn’t matter if they are or aren’t using that data- it is being sent to them on their own accord and terms. The public has no way of knowing.
And this is all perfectly acceptable, as long as you do one of the following:
All of this doesn’t really matter if the dev isn’t willing to change anything about the remote image.
But a fork?? Yeah, totally unnecessary. You can take easily care of this at the reverse proxy layer by preventing the svg (or anything else for that matter) from being served. Just serve a 404 or something instead or do a regex replace and remove it altogether from the page prior to serving.