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I will assume your questions are in good faith. OSS is code is generally made by unpaid volunteers. There may be some operational effort behind it, too, in ter

I will assume your questions are in good faith. OSS is code is generally made by unpaid volunteers. There may be some operational effort behind it, too, in terms of building and distributing binaries. But gathering remote telemetry is NOT typically something I would expect to be part of typical project operations. After all, who is gathering the data? What is the organization, what is the locus of control? That's easy to answer for a business, but hard for an OSS project. The "telemetry" mechanism I have come to expect from OSS is the "bug report", where telemetry will be produced explicitly by me. I understand exactly what this means, what the data is, and why it's being collected. Moreover, I have expectations about how it will (and will not) be used (although, now that I think about it, I think those expectations need to be examined. I can see how bad actors could be using the data in these bug trackers for nefarious ends!) This is a material privacy invasion because it violates the norms around what we expect from our software. I don't expect Audacity to phone home, and I don't expect the entity that distributes binaries to include functionality designed to satisfy the Russian government's need for data, for example. The fact that Audacity is used to gather and process sound data makes this particularly concerning, as this can be very sensitive data, and they are clearly serving more than one master here. Hope that clears it up.

gentleman11 5y ago
Is that still true? Iirc, most contributions to the notable foss projects I know about are industry sponsored, whether by companies or trade organizations
- the_other 5y ago
  I think at this point it's clear we need to stop calling those OSS, and instead call them "volunteer-developed" (or some other euphemism for the owner externalising the cost of dev and test).
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you're getting at. Do you think that most not-hobby FOSS projects are somehow 'profiteered' by freeloading companies who own them but don't invest any time or labor into them?
jfrunyon 5y ago
> The "telemetry" mechanism I have come to expect from OSS is the "bug report", where telemetry will be produced explicitly by me. I understand exactly what this means, what the data is, and why it's being collected. That's very rarely true.
Griffinsauce 5y ago
> I will assume your questions are in good faith. Stating this is not necessary. --- I understand what you're saying but in practice there is a big problem with user-driven bug reports: they don't happen. So there's a gap there between your expectations of "only user sanctioned network usage" and developing a product that is better to use (for you!). Besides, does everyone share your expectations? I don't. Your last paragraph goes off the rails quite a bit and is exactly the kind of thing that is counter productive IMO. Suddenly the Russians are involved when we're talking about logging some exceptions to Sentry? This is what makes people stop listening. We need to find a balance between privacy and practicality if we want the general public to use more OSS, this absolutism is effectively gate keeping and makes me sad for the missed potential.
- javajosh 5y ago
  Several problems with your post: First, it is necessary to state my assumption, clearly. Especially when it seems it was at least partly false. Good faith means that you're interested in learning, not winning. But the remaining points show your motive is winning, not learning. Second, you argue against the straw-man that I think everyone shares my expectations. I don't, and in my experience this is precisely the kind of mistake someone wanting badly to "win" makes. Third, you attack me personally by characterizing one of my statements as "going off the rails", and follow that up with your own statement that assumes you know what "people" will and will not listen to. Again, it's the rhetorical baggage of the sophist, not the reasoned debate I would prefer. Go ahead and keep arguing that passive phone-home behavior in FOSS is fine and that arguing against it is actually harming the public in general, and their privacy in particular. I think it's a ridiculous argument on its face and I don't think the person making it is making it in good faith, so I am not going to discuss it further with you.
  - Griffinsauce 5y ago
    Your "good faith" statement only exists to elevate yourself, it adds nothing to the discussion, neither does the rest of this personal attack. Stating someone's argument is "ridiculous on its face" shows that you're actually not trying for reasoned debate, you clearly haven't even given the point made a single thought. This is very much my point: it's absolutism that leads to aggressive lines of argument and yes, I believe this is harmful to the general public.
JetSpiegel 5y ago
https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues Audacity has 300 open issues and 60 Pull Requests for review. There's already more bugs to be fixed (or triaged) than they can handle, do they really need a bigger deluge of new issues to handle?

gentleman11 5y ago

Is that still true? Iirc, most contributions to the notable foss projects I know about are industry sponsored, whether by companies or trade organizations

the_other 5y ago
I think at this point it's clear we need to stop calling those OSS, and instead call them "volunteer-developed" (or some other euphemism for the owner externalising the cost of dev and test).
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you're getting at. Do you think that most not-hobby FOSS projects are somehow 'profiteered' by freeloading companies who own them but don't invest any time or labor into them?

jfrunyon 5y ago

> The "telemetry" mechanism I have come to expect from OSS is the "bug report", where telemetry will be produced explicitly by me. I understand exactly what this means, what the data is, and why it's being collected. That's very rarely true.

Griffinsauce 5y ago

> I will assume your questions are in good faith. Stating this is not necessary. --- I understand what you're saying but in practice there is a big problem with user-driven bug reports: they don't happen. So there's a gap there between your expectations of "only user sanctioned network usage" and developing a product that is better to use (for you!). Besides, does everyone share your expectations? I don't. Your last paragraph goes off the rails quite a bit and is exactly the kind of thing that is counter productive IMO. Suddenly the Russians are involved when we're talking about logging some exceptions to Sentry? This is what makes people stop listening. We need to find a balance between privacy and practicality if we want the general public to use more OSS, this absolutism is effectively gate keeping and makes me sad for the missed potential.

javajosh 5y ago
Several problems with your post: First, it is necessary to state my assumption, clearly. Especially when it seems it was at least partly false. Good faith means that you're interested in learning, not winning. But the remaining points show your motive is winning, not learning. Second, you argue against the straw-man that I think everyone shares my expectations. I don't, and in my experience this is precisely the kind of mistake someone wanting badly to "win" makes. Third, you attack me personally by characterizing one of my statements as "going off the rails", and follow that up with your own statement that assumes you know what "people" will and will not listen to. Again, it's the rhetorical baggage of the sophist, not the reasoned debate I would prefer. Go ahead and keep arguing that passive phone-home behavior in FOSS is fine and that arguing against it is actually harming the public in general, and their privacy in particular. I think it's a ridiculous argument on its face and I don't think the person making it is making it in good faith, so I am not going to discuss it further with you.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  Your "good faith" statement only exists to elevate yourself, it adds nothing to the discussion, neither does the rest of this personal attack. Stating someone's argument is "ridiculous on its face" shows that you're actually not trying for reasoned debate, you clearly haven't even given the point made a single thought. This is very much my point: it's absolutism that leads to aggressive lines of argument and yes, I believe this is harmful to the general public.

JetSpiegel 5y ago

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues Audacity has 300 open issues and 60 Pull Requests for review. There's already more bugs to be fixed (or triaged) than they can handle, do they really need a bigger deluge of new issues to handle?