Smolt is a hardware profiler which sends out put back to a public webserver being run by Redhat. Turn it on, and Redhat can see what hardware you are running. This type of phone home service is one that we have talked about for a long time at MySQL.
Would users be open to us sending back non private data about their systems? OS, machine type, config parameters, storage engines used... information found in show variables. What is the level of detail?
Would any detail be too much? Even if the code laid dormant unless turned on, what would users think?
I'm happy to see one of the open source vendors take this leap. I think open information like this is great, since it allows software writers to target more. I am not that concerned with this sort of information being made publicly (and yes I realize that knowing kernel version could be used to target machines to be hacked).
You can see the current statistics here:
http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/stats