The "opt-in" you're speaking of was leaving the API key textbox blank.
My understanding is that this being filled in with anything is enough to have iTerm potentially send commands to OpenAI. There are also many companies that reject any applications that integrate with 3p AI services, which iTerm would have been caught up with.
Once your labor of love is used by hundreds of thousands/millions of people, then it's not unreasonable to receive complaints when the maintainer makes an unpopular decision. Not everyone has time to fork and maintain their own copy.
Entering an API key doesn't immediately cause iTerm to start send data to OpenAI. That's a straight up lie started by people who actually tested the feature and posted their findings on the GitLab thread [1][2] about it.
OpenAI integration is activated after you write a question to be sent to the AI [3]. It takes many clicking and typing to get to that point and can't possibly happen by accident.
It's one thing to not like a feature. But to behave in the way people behaved is not merely ridiculous, it's wrong and horrifying. People came to the issue tracker from Mastodon looking to start a fight that was uncalled for, threw insults and lies, and fantasized about physically harming the dev [4]. When all they could've done to avoid the feature was to simply do nothing.
The "opt-in" you're speaking of was leaving the API key textbox blank.
My understanding is that this being filled in with anything is enough to have iTerm potentially send commands to OpenAI. There are also many companies that reject any applications that integrate with 3p AI services, which iTerm would have been caught up with.
Once your labor of love is used by hundreds of thousands/millions of people, then it's not unreasonable to receive complaints when the maintainer makes an unpopular decision. Not everyone has time to fork and maintain their own copy.