this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Too ~~long~~ video, didn't ~~read~~ watch.
So what happened to audacity?
Basically, they were bought out by MuseGroup. MuseGroup tried to add telemetry and some bad TOS stuff. It all got reversed.
Wait, THAT was the issue? (I thought it was another program that got sold, and the new owner bundled it with malware or something.) Is there something wrong with MuseGroup? I've been using MuseScore for ages.
The FOSS community really HATE tracking and telemetry. For example, google get a lot of flak recently for attempting to add telemetry to golang compiler and had to make it opt-in (instead of opt-out) as a compromise.
I really understand this as a starting position, but it can definitely be taken too far. I feel like the details matter a lot.
A few years ago there was a big dust up in the Julia community when they wanted to add a small amount of telemetry to the package servers - basically the plan was to identify real users from things like CI runs, and to be able to identify the number of unique users , which matters a lot, especially for grant writing (and a lot of academics use Julia, so this would be a boon to the ecosystem).
The core devs were super up front about it, offered easy opt-out, and even were receptive to a plan that would switch from unique identifiers for downloaders to some scheme that would give an accurate count without the ability to trace a particular download to a particular user, but a couple of prominent members of the community were incensed.