16 ms·

Audacity fork without any sentry telemetry or crash reporting

407 points by ushakov 5y ago

AbuAssar 5y ago
Vlc and firefox both have crash reporting and updaters, Yet no one is complaining. So what makes audacity special?
- roca 5y ago
  People do complain about Firefox crash reporting, updates and telemetry. However, those have been in Firefox for years. What's happening here is change which always makes people extra-angry.
- sfisthemoon 5y ago
  They collect "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)." That's pretty suspect. There's also this part "However, we are occasionally required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia." See for yourself https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/ https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/
gizdan 5y ago
I have no horse in this race, but wouldn't it be better to keep crash reports in there? Of course it should be disabled by default, and it would never be uploaded. That way individuals can raise issues and attach the crashreports if they need to.
- jitl 5y ago
  I think the reaction is completely overblown, the telemetry and crash reporting are already opt-in. The auto-update-checker (opt-out) only reveals OS, as part of HTTP user-agent, and IP, as part of the TCP connection.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Yeah, an offline audio editing program should not phone home in any way without advance consent. The autoupdate check serves as telemetry.
    - orf 5y ago
      Stop. Just stop. Software needs to reach out to the internet to provide some much-needed functionality such as auto-updating or crash reporting. Branding any of this as telemetry then creating a bunch of immediately abandoned forks is a joke. Before you say “well make this opt-in” - that doesn’t work for crash reporting nor does it really work for auto-updating. Things change. The internet needs Javascript, distributing desktop apps using electron makes a lot of sense and developers need automated feedback. Please stop.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        > creating a bunch of immediately abandoned forks is a joke. This part is not inherently true. Only time will tell how Audacity reacts, and they could very well have an UnGoogled-Chromium/Codium situation on their hands.
        orf 5y ago
        Picking two applications with less global users than a small town or a large village doesn’t make a great point. They might as well have been abandoned - no relevant mass of people use them.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        Ah, my bad. I'll stick to S&P Top 500 companies next time.
        orf 5y ago
        No, stick to forks that manage to reach a self-sustaining level above “one or two users cherry-picking from an upstream repo as a passion project”. My point is that a fork can be abandoned by users even if the project is still active.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  wouldn't it be better to keep crash reports in there? Different people have different needs and different levels of sensitivity to this sort of thing. Personally, I don't want my offline audio editor talking to anything without asking. But since Audacity doesn't do that, this will be what I use instead. If Audacity were to ask before sending data, a good chunk of people wouldn't be upset. But it doesn't, so here we are. Also — and I've said it before — automatic "telemetry" and crash reporting is just lazy. It also lacks context. If you want to know what your users' experience is like, just ask them.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Ask who? In-product surveys would be ignored or trigger this same outrage, and requests for an email address at download time simply result in throwaway accounts and other garbage input. What successful ways can you envision that a software developer ought to be asking their users for their experience, when the software is available for free without restriction upon download or use? How would you ensure that users who are satisfied with the way Audacity is working will take an equivalent amount of time to report their satisfaction as users who aren't satisfied with the way Audacity is working, so that your feedback is representative of the userbase as a whole rather than of the vocal subset that have problems? Would you advise Audacity to stop trying to measure or assess its users and their opinions, and instead simply do whatever they think is best for Audacity without harvesting user data? If Audacity truly accepted the view that the product should never report a single byte of information back to them and that they should never attempt to collect any data whatsoever about their users, then they would be forced to make decisions about Audacity without those users' data (including their opinions!), even if those decisions could end up being disliked or contentious among a subset of the users. At that point I expect they would likely determine that product autoupdate and feature usage metrics are a valuable feature for the product and not of concern to most users, and then ship those — regardless of the cries of outrage from the subset that hold contradictory opinions — because, after all, that subset demanded not to exist to Audacity, and so their wish is fulfilled. How can the vocal contingent of Audacity users who say "my existence should remain unknown to those who make the software I use" expect to have their opinions considered relevant, when they specifically demand not to be considered as existing at all?
- tester756 5y ago
  >Of course it should be disabled by default, and it would never be uploaded. I believe when you make crash reports / telemetry disabled by default then you lose a lot of reports, thus make your life harder as a developer that wants to deliver high quality solution for as many OSes, hardwares, configurations, blabla. I don't have problem that e.g my IDE would report how many files and lines of code my project has, because it may allow devs to make better decisions.
  - gizdan 5y ago
    > I believe when you make crash reports / telemetry disabled by default then you lose a lot of reports, Perhaps I should have been clearer. I think something similar to Firefox's crash reports. If a crash happens, prompt the user and show them the report, and finally, let them decide. Perhaps even take out the networking features and open the default client with an attachment or a path of the report so they can be attached to a github issue.
    - detaro 5y ago
      > Perhaps I should have been clearer. I think something similar to Firefox's crash reports. If a crash happens, prompt the user and show them the report, and finally, let them decide. So, like Audacity?
- me551ah 5y ago
  The reaction is completely overblown. As a software developer myself I know how important crash reports are to figure out which bugs are impacting the most number of users. If everyone moved to this version without telemetry, we would end up with a far buggier version of Audacity because the developer has no clue of what bugs of prioritize. Audacity runs on multiple OSs and with the huge amount of hardware devices available, it's impossible for the maintainer of an open source project to test them all. I really hope that this project doesn't catch up, for the sake of bug-free audacity.
  - geofft 5y ago
    But if this project does catch on, it indicates that users prefer a pro-privacy Audacity to a bug-free Audacity. That might not be the decision you (or I) would prefer, but I think it's a legitimate decision for users to make and we ought to respect that.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      It indicates bias in reporting too. There are a few people I know using Audacity and they have not heard of this whole issue (yet?) - and I really don't expect they will care if they do. So I expect we'll have some hardline pro-privacy users keeping this fork while a majority keeps doing their work using the original upstream. Here we'll only hear the strong pro-privacy views because that's the news.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ploxiln 5y ago
    How did Audacity gain it's popularity over the past 15 years, without any of this stuff? Did you use computers 15 years ago? Linux desktop and open source tools? Nothing had this crap back then, and some of it was pretty good. Audacity itself is an example! Open source software is not a commercial product. You don't need to prioritize and optimize for engagement or market share or any such crap. Just fix what you want, fix what you can, interested capable users will contribute attempted fixes for their own problems and you incorporate them if they make sense to the project. I don't think telemetry has ever resulted in good software, it just pushes everything towards being an iPad with one button on it. Only skilled tasteful developers make good software, and that was true long before telemetry existed.
- detaro 5y ago
  I mean, the crash reports appear to be with a confirmation in upstream already? (see screenshot in https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/836 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/836)
  - gizdan 5y ago
    Honestly, in my opinion this is completely reasonable. This is exactly how many different software do this including Firefox and Android (by default anyway). As others have mentioned the blowback on this is, in my opinion, entirely unreasonable. Having said that, Sentry integration is another matter.
    - detaro 5y ago
      > Having said that, Sentry integration is another matter. How? I only know Sentry as the backend tool you use to analyze the uploaded crashdumps? Or do you mean that a "crash report" could be something smaller than a minidump? (although I personally think a minidump is not a bad compromise)
- jjulius 5y ago
  >I have no horse in this race, but wouldn't it be better to keep crash reports in there? Audacity has been around for 21 years, has generated a strong following from a wide range of users, and is one of the most widely-loved FOSS projects. It achieved said status without telemetry for 21 years. People keep saying the telemetry thing is "overblown", but there is clearly a large number of us who simply don't want it. It doesn't need it, and the past 21 years have demonstrated that.
blt 5y ago
Is there any decision on tracking upstream vs. diverging?
dane-pgp 5y ago
Shouldn't this have a separate name, to avoid confusion and filesystem/repository clashes? I don't know if there is a trademark involved, but that's a potential legal issue the project will want to keep clear of. If there isn't a leading suggestion for the new name yet, I offer "Temerity". It's a close synonym for "Audacity", and highlights both the boldness of this new project, and the recklessness of Muse Group's changes. It also cleverly alludes to (avoiding) "Telemetry", which is a distinguishing feature of the fork.
- ushakov 5y ago
  Sneedacity seems popular! https://github.com/cookiengineer/audacity/issues/18 https://github.com/cookiengineer/audacity/issues/18
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Formerly Chuck's, I'm presuming.
  - ushakov 5y ago
    for anyone wondering what makes the name special https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sneeds-feed-and-seed https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sneeds-feed-and-seed
  - boba7 5y ago
    I'm getting censored on HN just for linking to the new fork. Thanks guys. Very Democracy.
  - NullPrefix 5y ago
    > This issue has been deleted. Is Sneedacity somehow a dogger whistle?
    - marcthe12 5y ago
      They were raided by 4chan so could be some screwed up stuff
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: Audacity: Clarification of Privacy Policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27739596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27739596 - July 2021 (80 comments) Audacity 3.0 called spyware over data collection changes by new owner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27736151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27736151 - July 2021 (70 comments) Audacity may collect “Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation” and more - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27727150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27727150 - July 2021 (254 comments) New [July 2, 2021] Audacity Data Collection Policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724389 - July 2021 (34 comments)
boba7 5y ago
Already censoring people you don't like? Is this guy a kid? People vote sneed, respect their vote. What is this?
rvz 5y ago
Yet the whole source is sitting on a closed-source software platform called GitHub, that also uses telemetry. (You know where this goes) Outraged users creating issues about Audacity's privacy policy about telemetry [0] in their software probably haven't even read GitHub's privacy policy. [0] https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213
PieUser 5y ago
I don't see anything wrong with telemetry or crash reporting in open source software
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
shmerl 5y ago
Looking forward to someone finally merging XDG base directory support.
boba7 5y ago
Why is this censored by HN? Cookie is a mod here? https://github.com/formerlychuck/sneedacity https://github.com/formerlychuck/sneedacity
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
malkia 5y ago
Name proposal: Audiotown
roca 5y ago
I wish we could add telemetry to the rr debugger without risking this sort of blowback. We have no idea how many people are using rr, and how much, so when we talk to hardware vendors and other groups we depend on, we have no leverage. This is a real problem. It would be a big boost to free software if some org like Freedesktop had a standard telemetry library, data collection policy, data collection and publication service, and a distro-wide master switch to opt into data collection, and it was socially acceptable to use that framework.
- Animats 5y ago
  You can check downloads. No, we do not need a "standard telemetry library". A standard crash reporter might be OK. It should ask the user if you want to submit a crash report, and give you a ticket number which allows you to visit a web site and see what's been done about it.
  - jeffgreco 5y ago
    Downloads are an incredibly non-useful statistic. Appreciate your disinterest in providing information but it’s disingenuous to say this is a worthwhile piece of data.
  - roca 5y ago
    You can get rr in many ways: distro packages, Github release downloads, cloning the repo and building it yourself. It's difficult to track all that. Also it matters how much people use rr. If a lot of people download it, use it once and never use it again that's important information (especially if you also report when it worked and when it didn't work).
- manquer 5y ago
  You could make it optional ? Mozilla does it . Nobody is forking Firefox over just that, I don't think everyone is against it. If it opt out and part of the install process and uses know what kind of data will be used it should be fine. Audacity seems a exception here. They are broadly following this kind of rules , however there is blowback which other projects don't seem to be getting. Perhaps there are underlying issues in the community ?
SirensOfTitan 5y ago
I find this trend against reasonable telemetry in OSS ridiculous and naively idealistic. I could also divine that perhaps 90%+ of Audacity users use a closed source application that uses invasive telemetry. The way the free software community treats its own is reminiscent of progressives in America: constantly eating your own kind while letting your opponents flourish. There’s a reasonable amount of telemetry, and without it the free, OSS side can’t compete with closed source products on a level playing field. I’ll even go further and suggest that light telemetry should be on (and able to be disabled) by default.
- blendergeek 5y ago
  If the telemetry was even opt-out at run time, the fork would never have happened.
  - djur 5y ago
    But it is. The only network communication that isn't opt-in is the update checker, and that has an opt-out.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  More people are worried that the new TOS conflicts with the code license, which seems like fair criticism (why does it need to enforce a minimum age? why are we withholding information for law enforcement?). Had they approached this from a more transparent/secure perspective it would have been a lot more understandable, but Open Source has always been about voluntary contribution, which is how it sustains an otherwise suicidal business model. Until recently, there was no incentive to add telemetry, but Audacity has recently undergone a bit of a takeover (maybe "change in management" is more apt), which gives plenty of people reason for concern. I'm certainly going to be sticking to the forks on my machine, but it's ultimately up to the users, and to a greater degree, the volunteers.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  Here is the repository for the Microsoft calculator: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator https://github.com/microsoft/calculator An application universally ridiculed for it's inclusion of in-depth telemetry. It's time to challenge your preconceptions: find the roadmap items, features or bugs informed by the gathering of the telemetry data. Here is what's really happening: * Migrating the codebase to C# * Iterating upon the existing app design based on the latest guidelines for Fluent Design and WinUI That last one is probably going to be obsolete by the time they are finished. What's the value here that telemetry is delivering? This is the story all over the industry. Fancy dashboards everywhere, but the people shaping products haven't made an evidence-based decision in years.
pigbearpig 5y ago
The explanation by the Audacity devs seemed pretty reasonable to me. Getting all up in arms and forking seems to be making something out of nothing, are these people just bored?
makecheck 5y ago
Here is the problem I see: 1. Users enjoy product for free. 2. Users pretty much never tell maintainers what is going wrong for them: no messages (much less proper bug reports), no contributions in any way! 3. Something invariably goes wrong for users that do the above. 4. Users immediately hit social media and try to tar the entire project, developer/company reputation, whatever. “Zero stars”, doesn’t work in their use case. You have surely seen these “reviews” before, and mindless tweets. THIS is why I am torn on telemetry to some degree. IF you demand no auto-feedback in the name of privacy, THEN you should help out voluntarily OR not use free software! Yet software maintainers can’t count on this at all. They risk being hanged in the public square for every bug.
- bsder 5y ago
  I'm completely cool with people forking Audacity. Now we can send all of the privacy seeking developers over to the new project where they can demonstrate their productivity. I see this fork as a wonderful thing as the Audacity people can finally kick the excessively whiny to the curb--I mean the new forked project.
- theHIDninja 5y ago
  Audacity brought this problem on themselves. They walked down the slippery slope of telemetry.
- benatkin 5y ago
  > 1. Users enjoy product for free. You got this part wrong. Users contribute to the project and/or draw contributers to the project. This happens to proprietary projects like twitter as well, where key features were invented by users. https://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retweet-as-twitter-users-invented-them/ https://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retwe...
- phowat 5y ago
  What if the telemetry data went through an intermediary you trust? I’ve been thinking about this and I am similarly torn on the issue. But if I knew the data was going to pass through some organization I trust , like the eff for example, I’d be much more comfortable opting in. This would be a sort of guarantee that the data I’m giving away is needed to improve the software and is not going to be used for anything else.
throwaaskjdfh 5y ago
As a meta-point, I'm kinda surprised how attitudes among programmers have reversed in the last 20 years, from phoning home being suspicious under any circumstances, to telemetry being indispensable. I suspect the two sides of the argument map pretty closely to age.
- ghoward 5y ago
  I agree, although I am one of the younger generation that believes what the older generation is saying on this one.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    Me too, I’m younger but very much in the boat of “paying for software quality with your privacy is usually a bad trade”. Nothing inherently needs to phone home, it’s a design choice rather than a mandate chiselled in a stone tablet. If people want privacy over speedier bug fixes that’s a legitimate thing to want. Open source users tend to be more privacy conscious anyway, even if Ultimate Guitar / Muse aren’t acting in bad faith (and they do have a bad reputation) then they’re showing a shocking lack of understanding about what they’ve taken over.
technojunkie 5y ago
I hope this type of fork can be converted to repeat the same model that VSCodium uses for VSCode. https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/ VSCodium is not a fork but it also strips out the telemetry that VSCode integrates.
twodave 5y ago
Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of petty? It's not like Audacity is trying to read your email (or even rip off your tracks). The telemetry I'm reading about is literally: 1. error reporting - the user has to click a button to share crash logs. It's basically a macro to help the user create a support ticket. 2. version checking - no PII information being kept, literally just helping the developer get an idea of what versions they need to be supporting--you do want them to support the version you're running, right? Well, if not, you can turn it off. What's the big deal?
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  My guess is that GitHub where the code is hosted collects way more telemetry than this and nobody bats an eye at that.
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    Nobody? I’ve been giving some thought to https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/ recently because of that sort of thing
    - zxzax 5y ago
      Please make sure you check the privacy policy there as well: https://man.sr.ht/privacy.md https://man.sr.ht/privacy.md It's not clear what sort of thing you're referring to, it's generally not possible to make a service where you have accounts and billing, that simultaneously doesn't store your information. The whole point of it is that you want it to store your information.
    - IgorPartola 5y ago
      Nobody is an absolutist statement. The people hosting this code clearly didn’t give this much thought. People downloading it likely won’t either.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    Whatever telemetry GitHub collects is probably the least interesting stuff they have on me. What's way more revealing about me as a person is all the stuff that GitHub is collecting and storing about me because storing that information is exactly what GitHub is for: code I've written, interactions with people in issue discussions, billing information related to my account, projects I've starred, etc. Yes, they probably also know that I usually connect from an IP address in Chicago. And, while storing that information isn't strictly necessary, I'm also more-or-less 100% confident in saying that anyone who might want to keep tabs on me already knows I live in Chicago, and that would have been true 30 years ago, too. (Well, 30 years ago it was another town, but still.) I suppose a lot of this is maybe just a halo effect due to all the (quite legitimate) upset about surveillance capitalism? Which is fair. And perhaps we want to say that it's easier to try and shut down all telemetry than it is to distinguish legitimate telemetry from abusive telemetry. Lord knows, if we try to carve out any concept of legitimate telemetry, adtech companies will immediately go about probing it for loopholes.
edsonmedina 5y ago
Tin foil edition
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Donckele 5y ago
You know, if I had influence I’d remove all the “features”, release a new version and make a public announcement. Audacity has been such a great piece of software for so many years and would be a great shame for all of us if it slowly went to pieces and disappeared. Then again, maybe this must happen for new software and alternatives to be born - there are industrial strength audio libraries available as open source that will be used to create the next iteration of audio editors. Even browsers are capable of 80% of what most people use Audacity for. I suppose its a part of life, good things come to an end and then you have to go through the trash to find the next good thing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
_bmeo 5y ago
Creator of the fork here. Had some troubles, as we (and I personally, and my loved ones) were hit by a 4chan raid. Take the comments in the issues on GitHub with a grain of salt, it's impossible to get ahead of this. Need to wait for things to cool down to be able to organize everything later. Anyways, AMA or something :)
- ushakov 5y ago
  hey, could you make a blogpost about this whole 4chan story? i think it would be an interesting peace to read for any FOSS dev
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dial_8 5y ago
  > they also called me on my pinephone. More than 70 calls. [1] That's rather horrible. Do you know where they might've found your pinephone number? [1]: https://twitter.com/cookiengineer/status/1412201646378131459 https://twitter.com/cookiengineer/status/1412201646378131459
  - TLLtchvL8KZ 5y ago
    >This Tweet is unavailable. Strange.
    - dial_8 5y ago
      Yeah the author deleted the tweet moments after I asked the question... I thought I messed up the link but that doesn't seem to be the case. I just found it rather scary how these 4chan trolls are able to find his pinephone number despite it not being on his website or any of his social media.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
Curiously and arguably somewhat hypocritically, this fork is hosted on github, which relies on telemetry and user data.

407 points by ushakov 5y ago

AbuAssar 5y ago

Vlc and firefox both have crash reporting and updaters, Yet no one is complaining. So what makes audacity special?

roca 5y ago
People do complain about Firefox crash reporting, updates and telemetry. However, those have been in Firefox for years. What's happening here is change which always makes people extra-angry.
sfisthemoon 5y ago
They collect "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)." That's pretty suspect. There's also this part "However, we are occasionally required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia." See for yourself https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/ https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/

gizdan 5y ago

I have no horse in this race, but wouldn't it be better to keep crash reports in there? Of course it should be disabled by default, and it would never be uploaded. That way individuals can raise issues and attach the crashreports if they need to.

jitl 5y ago
I think the reaction is completely overblown, the telemetry and crash reporting are already opt-in. The auto-update-checker (opt-out) only reveals OS, as part of HTTP user-agent, and IP, as part of the TCP connection.
- sneak 5y ago
  Yeah, an offline audio editing program should not phone home in any way without advance consent. The autoupdate check serves as telemetry.
  - orf 5y ago
    Stop. Just stop. Software needs to reach out to the internet to provide some much-needed functionality such as auto-updating or crash reporting. Branding any of this as telemetry then creating a bunch of immediately abandoned forks is a joke. Before you say “well make this opt-in” - that doesn’t work for crash reporting nor does it really work for auto-updating. Things change. The internet needs Javascript, distributing desktop apps using electron makes a lot of sense and developers need automated feedback. Please stop.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      > creating a bunch of immediately abandoned forks is a joke. This part is not inherently true. Only time will tell how Audacity reacts, and they could very well have an UnGoogled-Chromium/Codium situation on their hands.
      - orf 5y ago
        Picking two applications with less global users than a small town or a large village doesn’t make a great point. They might as well have been abandoned - no relevant mass of people use them.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        Ah, my bad. I'll stick to S&P Top 500 companies next time.
        orf 5y ago
        No, stick to forks that manage to reach a self-sustaining level above “one or two users cherry-picking from an upstream repo as a passion project”. My point is that a fork can be abandoned by users even if the project is still active.
reaperducer 5y ago
wouldn't it be better to keep crash reports in there? Different people have different needs and different levels of sensitivity to this sort of thing. Personally, I don't want my offline audio editor talking to anything without asking. But since Audacity doesn't do that, this will be what I use instead. If Audacity were to ask before sending data, a good chunk of people wouldn't be upset. But it doesn't, so here we are. Also — and I've said it before — automatic "telemetry" and crash reporting is just lazy. It also lacks context. If you want to know what your users' experience is like, just ask them.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Ask who? In-product surveys would be ignored or trigger this same outrage, and requests for an email address at download time simply result in throwaway accounts and other garbage input. What successful ways can you envision that a software developer ought to be asking their users for their experience, when the software is available for free without restriction upon download or use? How would you ensure that users who are satisfied with the way Audacity is working will take an equivalent amount of time to report their satisfaction as users who aren't satisfied with the way Audacity is working, so that your feedback is representative of the userbase as a whole rather than of the vocal subset that have problems? Would you advise Audacity to stop trying to measure or assess its users and their opinions, and instead simply do whatever they think is best for Audacity without harvesting user data? If Audacity truly accepted the view that the product should never report a single byte of information back to them and that they should never attempt to collect any data whatsoever about their users, then they would be forced to make decisions about Audacity without those users' data (including their opinions!), even if those decisions could end up being disliked or contentious among a subset of the users. At that point I expect they would likely determine that product autoupdate and feature usage metrics are a valuable feature for the product and not of concern to most users, and then ship those — regardless of the cries of outrage from the subset that hold contradictory opinions — because, after all, that subset demanded not to exist to Audacity, and so their wish is fulfilled. How can the vocal contingent of Audacity users who say "my existence should remain unknown to those who make the software I use" expect to have their opinions considered relevant, when they specifically demand not to be considered as existing at all?
tester756 5y ago
>Of course it should be disabled by default, and it would never be uploaded. I believe when you make crash reports / telemetry disabled by default then you lose a lot of reports, thus make your life harder as a developer that wants to deliver high quality solution for as many OSes, hardwares, configurations, blabla. I don't have problem that e.g my IDE would report how many files and lines of code my project has, because it may allow devs to make better decisions.
- gizdan 5y ago
  > I believe when you make crash reports / telemetry disabled by default then you lose a lot of reports, Perhaps I should have been clearer. I think something similar to Firefox's crash reports. If a crash happens, prompt the user and show them the report, and finally, let them decide. Perhaps even take out the networking features and open the default client with an attachment or a path of the report so they can be attached to a github issue.
  - detaro 5y ago
    > Perhaps I should have been clearer. I think something similar to Firefox's crash reports. If a crash happens, prompt the user and show them the report, and finally, let them decide. So, like Audacity?
me551ah 5y ago
The reaction is completely overblown. As a software developer myself I know how important crash reports are to figure out which bugs are impacting the most number of users. If everyone moved to this version without telemetry, we would end up with a far buggier version of Audacity because the developer has no clue of what bugs of prioritize. Audacity runs on multiple OSs and with the huge amount of hardware devices available, it's impossible for the maintainer of an open source project to test them all. I really hope that this project doesn't catch up, for the sake of bug-free audacity.
- geofft 5y ago
  But if this project does catch on, it indicates that users prefer a pro-privacy Audacity to a bug-free Audacity. That might not be the decision you (or I) would prefer, but I think it's a legitimate decision for users to make and we ought to respect that.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    It indicates bias in reporting too. There are a few people I know using Audacity and they have not heard of this whole issue (yet?) - and I really don't expect they will care if they do. So I expect we'll have some hardline pro-privacy users keeping this fork while a majority keeps doing their work using the original upstream. Here we'll only hear the strong pro-privacy views because that's the news.
- deleted 5y ago
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- ploxiln 5y ago
  How did Audacity gain it's popularity over the past 15 years, without any of this stuff? Did you use computers 15 years ago? Linux desktop and open source tools? Nothing had this crap back then, and some of it was pretty good. Audacity itself is an example! Open source software is not a commercial product. You don't need to prioritize and optimize for engagement or market share or any such crap. Just fix what you want, fix what you can, interested capable users will contribute attempted fixes for their own problems and you incorporate them if they make sense to the project. I don't think telemetry has ever resulted in good software, it just pushes everything towards being an iPad with one button on it. Only skilled tasteful developers make good software, and that was true long before telemetry existed.
detaro 5y ago
I mean, the crash reports appear to be with a confirmation in upstream already? (see screenshot in https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/836 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/836)
- gizdan 5y ago
  Honestly, in my opinion this is completely reasonable. This is exactly how many different software do this including Firefox and Android (by default anyway). As others have mentioned the blowback on this is, in my opinion, entirely unreasonable. Having said that, Sentry integration is another matter.
  - detaro 5y ago
    > Having said that, Sentry integration is another matter. How? I only know Sentry as the backend tool you use to analyze the uploaded crashdumps? Or do you mean that a "crash report" could be something smaller than a minidump? (although I personally think a minidump is not a bad compromise)
jjulius 5y ago
>I have no horse in this race, but wouldn't it be better to keep crash reports in there? Audacity has been around for 21 years, has generated a strong following from a wide range of users, and is one of the most widely-loved FOSS projects. It achieved said status without telemetry for 21 years. People keep saying the telemetry thing is "overblown", but there is clearly a large number of us who simply don't want it. It doesn't need it, and the past 21 years have demonstrated that.

blt 5y ago

Is there any decision on tracking upstream vs. diverging?

dane-pgp 5y ago

Shouldn't this have a separate name, to avoid confusion and filesystem/repository clashes? I don't know if there is a trademark involved, but that's a potential legal issue the project will want to keep clear of. If there isn't a leading suggestion for the new name yet, I offer "Temerity". It's a close synonym for "Audacity", and highlights both the boldness of this new project, and the recklessness of Muse Group's changes. It also cleverly alludes to (avoiding) "Telemetry", which is a distinguishing feature of the fork.

ushakov 5y ago
Sneedacity seems popular! https://github.com/cookiengineer/audacity/issues/18 https://github.com/cookiengineer/audacity/issues/18
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Formerly Chuck's, I'm presuming.
- ushakov 5y ago
  for anyone wondering what makes the name special https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sneeds-feed-and-seed https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sneeds-feed-and-seed
- boba7 5y ago
  I'm getting censored on HN just for linking to the new fork. Thanks guys. Very Democracy.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  > This issue has been deleted. Is Sneedacity somehow a dogger whistle?
  - marcthe12 5y ago
    They were raided by 4chan so could be some screwed up stuff

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: Audacity: Clarification of Privacy Policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27739596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27739596 - July 2021 (80 comments) Audacity 3.0 called spyware over data collection changes by new owner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27736151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27736151 - July 2021 (70 comments) Audacity may collect “Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation” and more - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27727150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27727150 - July 2021 (254 comments) New [July 2, 2021] Audacity Data Collection Policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724389 - July 2021 (34 comments)

boba7 5y ago

Already censoring people you don't like? Is this guy a kid? People vote sneed, respect their vote. What is this?

rvz 5y ago

Yet the whole source is sitting on a closed-source software platform called GitHub, that also uses telemetry. (You know where this goes) Outraged users creating issues about Audacity's privacy policy about telemetry [0] in their software probably haven't even read GitHub's privacy policy. [0] https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213

PieUser 5y ago

I don't see anything wrong with telemetry or crash reporting in open source software

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shmerl 5y ago

Looking forward to someone finally merging XDG base directory support.

boba7 5y ago

Why is this censored by HN? Cookie is a mod here? https://github.com/formerlychuck/sneedacity https://github.com/formerlychuck/sneedacity

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malkia 5y ago

Name proposal: Audiotown

roca 5y ago

I wish we could add telemetry to the rr debugger without risking this sort of blowback. We have no idea how many people are using rr, and how much, so when we talk to hardware vendors and other groups we depend on, we have no leverage. This is a real problem. It would be a big boost to free software if some org like Freedesktop had a standard telemetry library, data collection policy, data collection and publication service, and a distro-wide master switch to opt into data collection, and it was socially acceptable to use that framework.

Animats 5y ago
You can check downloads. No, we do not need a "standard telemetry library". A standard crash reporter might be OK. It should ask the user if you want to submit a crash report, and give you a ticket number which allows you to visit a web site and see what's been done about it.
- jeffgreco 5y ago
  Downloads are an incredibly non-useful statistic. Appreciate your disinterest in providing information but it’s disingenuous to say this is a worthwhile piece of data.
- roca 5y ago
  You can get rr in many ways: distro packages, Github release downloads, cloning the repo and building it yourself. It's difficult to track all that. Also it matters how much people use rr. If a lot of people download it, use it once and never use it again that's important information (especially if you also report when it worked and when it didn't work).
manquer 5y ago
You could make it optional ? Mozilla does it . Nobody is forking Firefox over just that, I don't think everyone is against it. If it opt out and part of the install process and uses know what kind of data will be used it should be fine. Audacity seems a exception here. They are broadly following this kind of rules , however there is blowback which other projects don't seem to be getting. Perhaps there are underlying issues in the community ?

SirensOfTitan 5y ago

I find this trend against reasonable telemetry in OSS ridiculous and naively idealistic. I could also divine that perhaps 90%+ of Audacity users use a closed source application that uses invasive telemetry. The way the free software community treats its own is reminiscent of progressives in America: constantly eating your own kind while letting your opponents flourish. There’s a reasonable amount of telemetry, and without it the free, OSS side can’t compete with closed source products on a level playing field. I’ll even go further and suggest that light telemetry should be on (and able to be disabled) by default.

blendergeek 5y ago
If the telemetry was even opt-out at run time, the fork would never have happened.
- djur 5y ago
  But it is. The only network communication that isn't opt-in is the update checker, and that has an opt-out.
smoldesu 5y ago
More people are worried that the new TOS conflicts with the code license, which seems like fair criticism (why does it need to enforce a minimum age? why are we withholding information for law enforcement?). Had they approached this from a more transparent/secure perspective it would have been a lot more understandable, but Open Source has always been about voluntary contribution, which is how it sustains an otherwise suicidal business model. Until recently, there was no incentive to add telemetry, but Audacity has recently undergone a bit of a takeover (maybe "change in management" is more apt), which gives plenty of people reason for concern. I'm certainly going to be sticking to the forks on my machine, but it's ultimately up to the users, and to a greater degree, the volunteers.
stefan_ 5y ago
Here is the repository for the Microsoft calculator: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator https://github.com/microsoft/calculator An application universally ridiculed for it's inclusion of in-depth telemetry. It's time to challenge your preconceptions: find the roadmap items, features or bugs informed by the gathering of the telemetry data. Here is what's really happening: * Migrating the codebase to C# * Iterating upon the existing app design based on the latest guidelines for Fluent Design and WinUI That last one is probably going to be obsolete by the time they are finished. What's the value here that telemetry is delivering? This is the story all over the industry. Fancy dashboards everywhere, but the people shaping products haven't made an evidence-based decision in years.

pigbearpig 5y ago

The explanation by the Audacity devs seemed pretty reasonable to me. Getting all up in arms and forking seems to be making something out of nothing, are these people just bored?

makecheck 5y ago

Here is the problem I see: 1. Users enjoy product for free. 2. Users pretty much never tell maintainers what is going wrong for them: no messages (much less proper bug reports), no contributions in any way! 3. Something invariably goes wrong for users that do the above. 4. Users immediately hit social media and try to tar the entire project, developer/company reputation, whatever. “Zero stars”, doesn’t work in their use case. You have surely seen these “reviews” before, and mindless tweets. THIS is why I am torn on telemetry to some degree. IF you demand no auto-feedback in the name of privacy, THEN you should help out voluntarily OR not use free software! Yet software maintainers can’t count on this at all. They risk being hanged in the public square for every bug.

bsder 5y ago
I'm completely cool with people forking Audacity. Now we can send all of the privacy seeking developers over to the new project where they can demonstrate their productivity. I see this fork as a wonderful thing as the Audacity people can finally kick the excessively whiny to the curb--I mean the new forked project.
theHIDninja 5y ago
Audacity brought this problem on themselves. They walked down the slippery slope of telemetry.
benatkin 5y ago
> 1. Users enjoy product for free. You got this part wrong. Users contribute to the project and/or draw contributers to the project. This happens to proprietary projects like twitter as well, where key features were invented by users. https://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retweet-as-twitter-users-invented-them/ https://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retwe...
phowat 5y ago
What if the telemetry data went through an intermediary you trust? I’ve been thinking about this and I am similarly torn on the issue. But if I knew the data was going to pass through some organization I trust , like the eff for example, I’d be much more comfortable opting in. This would be a sort of guarantee that the data I’m giving away is needed to improve the software and is not going to be used for anything else.

throwaaskjdfh 5y ago

As a meta-point, I'm kinda surprised how attitudes among programmers have reversed in the last 20 years, from phoning home being suspicious under any circumstances, to telemetry being indispensable. I suspect the two sides of the argument map pretty closely to age.

ghoward 5y ago
I agree, although I am one of the younger generation that believes what the older generation is saying on this one.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  Me too, I’m younger but very much in the boat of “paying for software quality with your privacy is usually a bad trade”. Nothing inherently needs to phone home, it’s a design choice rather than a mandate chiselled in a stone tablet. If people want privacy over speedier bug fixes that’s a legitimate thing to want. Open source users tend to be more privacy conscious anyway, even if Ultimate Guitar / Muse aren’t acting in bad faith (and they do have a bad reputation) then they’re showing a shocking lack of understanding about what they’ve taken over.

technojunkie 5y ago

I hope this type of fork can be converted to repeat the same model that VSCodium uses for VSCode. https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/ VSCodium is not a fork but it also strips out the telemetry that VSCode integrates.

twodave 5y ago

Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of petty? It's not like Audacity is trying to read your email (or even rip off your tracks). The telemetry I'm reading about is literally: 1. error reporting - the user has to click a button to share crash logs. It's basically a macro to help the user create a support ticket. 2. version checking - no PII information being kept, literally just helping the developer get an idea of what versions they need to be supporting--you do want them to support the version you're running, right? Well, if not, you can turn it off. What's the big deal?

IgorPartola 5y ago
My guess is that GitHub where the code is hosted collects way more telemetry than this and nobody bats an eye at that.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Nobody? I’ve been giving some thought to https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/ recently because of that sort of thing
  - zxzax 5y ago
    Please make sure you check the privacy policy there as well: https://man.sr.ht/privacy.md https://man.sr.ht/privacy.md It's not clear what sort of thing you're referring to, it's generally not possible to make a service where you have accounts and billing, that simultaneously doesn't store your information. The whole point of it is that you want it to store your information.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    Nobody is an absolutist statement. The people hosting this code clearly didn’t give this much thought. People downloading it likely won’t either.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  Whatever telemetry GitHub collects is probably the least interesting stuff they have on me. What's way more revealing about me as a person is all the stuff that GitHub is collecting and storing about me because storing that information is exactly what GitHub is for: code I've written, interactions with people in issue discussions, billing information related to my account, projects I've starred, etc. Yes, they probably also know that I usually connect from an IP address in Chicago. And, while storing that information isn't strictly necessary, I'm also more-or-less 100% confident in saying that anyone who might want to keep tabs on me already knows I live in Chicago, and that would have been true 30 years ago, too. (Well, 30 years ago it was another town, but still.) I suppose a lot of this is maybe just a halo effect due to all the (quite legitimate) upset about surveillance capitalism? Which is fair. And perhaps we want to say that it's easier to try and shut down all telemetry than it is to distinguish legitimate telemetry from abusive telemetry. Lord knows, if we try to carve out any concept of legitimate telemetry, adtech companies will immediately go about probing it for loopholes.

edsonmedina 5y ago

Tin foil edition

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Donckele 5y ago

You know, if I had influence I’d remove all the “features”, release a new version and make a public announcement. Audacity has been such a great piece of software for so many years and would be a great shame for all of us if it slowly went to pieces and disappeared. Then again, maybe this must happen for new software and alternatives to be born - there are industrial strength audio libraries available as open source that will be used to create the next iteration of audio editors. Even browsers are capable of 80% of what most people use Audacity for. I suppose its a part of life, good things come to an end and then you have to go through the trash to find the next good thing.

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_bmeo 5y ago

Creator of the fork here. Had some troubles, as we (and I personally, and my loved ones) were hit by a 4chan raid. Take the comments in the issues on GitHub with a grain of salt, it's impossible to get ahead of this. Need to wait for things to cool down to be able to organize everything later. Anyways, AMA or something :)

ushakov 5y ago
hey, could you make a blogpost about this whole 4chan story? i think it would be an interesting peace to read for any FOSS dev
- deleted 5y ago
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dial_8 5y ago
> they also called me on my pinephone. More than 70 calls. [1] That's rather horrible. Do you know where they might've found your pinephone number? [1]: https://twitter.com/cookiengineer/status/1412201646378131459 https://twitter.com/cookiengineer/status/1412201646378131459
- TLLtchvL8KZ 5y ago
  >This Tweet is unavailable. Strange.
  - dial_8 5y ago
    Yeah the author deleted the tweet moments after I asked the question... I thought I messed up the link but that doesn't seem to be the case. I just found it rather scary how these 4chan trolls are able to find his pinephone number despite it not being on his website or any of his social media.
    - deleted 5y ago
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em3rgent0rdr 5y ago

Curiously and arguably somewhat hypocritically, this fork is hosted on github, which relies on telemetry and user data.