Speaking of which, how did that "audacity isn't FOSS" fuss end up?
A quick search shows tenacity is still active ( https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity ) but I have no idea how much the projects kept interacting after the initial debate
This sort of situation is bad for everyone: People get their workflow broken, devs need to do work to remove and later reinstate a feature, and privacy-minded people who want to complain need to share name and email to sign up on a forum for an account. In addition, it is hard to gauge what significance the forum posts have: If 100 people are complaining, are they a vocal minority of the millions of users Audacity has, or are they representative of most people?
This is especially true considering Audacity is the sort of casual "useful toolbox USB stick" program for many people - they're not going to closely follow development and updates or participate in polls or surveys, simply because it's not a part of their life they care about that much. This situation is different for something like Blender in which the tool tends to be a major part of your hobby or job if you use it at all. Although, saying that: This is a hypothesis based on my perception which cannot be verified as neither Blender nor Audacity track this data.
With telemetry (which for Audacity would have been a "do you want telemetry yes/no"-type dialog on first launch) the question "does anyone actually use the cut/copy/paste buttons?" would have been answered with "actually, yes", things would have been done differently, nobody's workflows would have been broken, and privacy-minded folks would not have needed to put emails on a forum which may or may not get hacked in the future.
In some sense, even people who disable telemetry benefit from telemetry being an option - assuming that their needs are in aggregate otherwise similar to the average user.
> Audacity's source code is currently released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). We intend to update the license to GPLv3 to enable support for new technologies not compatible with GPLv2 (i.e. - VST3, which is compatible with GPLv3).
VST3 is dual licensed with some Steinberg license and GPLv3. The purpose of the CLA was to be able to migrate Audacity binaries to GPLv3 with VST3 support. This has happened as of Audacity 3.2.
Other uses for the CLA are to publish the thing in app stores down the road. It's not stopping Audacity being open source, unless you consider Apache software not open source.
> The CLA also allows us to use the code in other products that may not be open source, which we intend to do at some point to support the continued development of Audacity.
I am well aware that you're allowed to do this with permissively licensed code, too.
Eventually, I held my nose and ran Audacity in a VM, and not a single crash.
Barring a VM escape exploit, I know that my private data is not getting exposed.
Only binaries from Audacity themselves had the telemetry, which (as usual) is why you should never use upstream binaries.
That’s kinda the blessing and the curse of FOSS. You absolutely can fork the repo, remove the telemetry, and republish it as a new app.
But fragmentation is confusing, requires a lot of maintenance, and really I’m not sure it was worth it. Those who are particularly conscious about the telemetry can block it with a single line in /etc/hosts.
i write this as someone who's been involved in one too many debates about the perils of introducing telemetry to a commercial open source thing because "HN would tear us apart"
The original email appears to indicate they intended to contact CCP authorities. The inference I took is that they believed the developer was in China.
Later they stated that violation of law in Canada could result in revocation of visa.
So "threated to have someone deported" is maybe a stretch, "tortuted" is pretty untrue.
The github issue appears to show a pretty reasonable attempt by both parties to move forward.
1. https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issu...
"If found in violation of laws, residency may be revoked and he may be deported to his home country. This becomes even further complicated given another repo of his – 'Fuck 学习强国', which is highly critical of the Chinese government. Were he deported to China, who knows how he may be received."
Hard to take that as anything but a threat. My point stands that Musegroup has proven that they should not be trusted with any information about users.
If it can fully run locally on my machine, I do not want it sending anything external.
Lastly, as an abused Firefox user, it seems that telemetry is only ever used to justify removing features I like.
If the removed features are only features you like, then they probably aren't doing things right... The one most relevant purpose for telemetry I see for Audacity is precisely preventing this from happening, meanwhile fostering a more vigorous growth of the repo by cutting off dead branches. Audacity is over 20 years of development of features, some of which we every now and again wonder if they're still used. Not knowing, we try our best maintaining these, which slows down Development, QA and Design in delivering features that are relevant now.
Using a user’s computer to spy on them when they don’t want it to is extremely rude, in all cases, even if the surveillance data is thrown away and never used.
Developers who implement such features should be named and highlighted and should have trouble finding new jobs. It’s shady and unethical to make such software, doing so should be a black mark on one’s professional record, just like stealing. It is literally malware.
Your assumption that violating consent is ok as long as it isn’t “nefarious” is the problem.
Distributions and open source maintainers looking out for their users, once again.
https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/6c2e8a2377542d6722...