7 ms·

Muse Group Continues Tone Deaf Handling of Audacity

117 points by nickthegreek 5y ago

mousepilot 5y ago
Holding out some hope for viable forks! I have a machine specifically reserved for attempting builds but I still remain pretty baffled over this wxwidgets business. My previous investigation resulted in failure because the project made reference to a resource that has since made unavailable. I still have a 2.2.x version that I use for day to day recording, flakey, unstable but works if I fiddle enough with it.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Sounds like any recording equipment of sufficient age. I get a buzz unless I wedge this piece of cardboard into the jack kind of fiddling?
  - mousepilot 5y ago
    lol yeah! I seem to have to fiddle with the input source, but it could be any number of things, including my linux installation.
TheChaplain 5y ago
Audacity/Tenacity is a really good application, I hope the fork gets some dedicated maintainers to keep it alive.
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
I can't tell if "Tone Deaf" was an intended pun or not.
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  I can!
  - dylan604 5y ago
    You must have perfect pitch
shams93 5y ago
The thing to do is use rust to build something much better than audacity that is owned by a not for profit foundation like Ghost.
- dylan604 5y ago
  The thing to do is not be an asshat and fuck up something that was doing just fine before your asshattery.
  - ryantgtg 5y ago
    Maybe you guys can find a middle ground here, and not be an asshat with rust? We definitely need rust in this equation.
zwieback 5y ago
Seems like Muse could handle it better but has Audacity kept up? I used it at first but moved on to Reaper quite some time ago.
- jan_Inkepa 5y ago
  Audacity is pretty good if your focus is editing/tweaking/cutting/splicing individual/small numbers of samples. Haven't at all felt the need for something more featureful still. Ripper seems to have some other niche. ( FWIW, Audacity is a million miles better than it was 10 years ago (aka it's more stable) )
  - falcolas 5y ago
    I've used both recently, here's my thoughts. Reaper's non-destructive editing is bloody priceless when compared to Audacity's. Plugins for reaper are... less well integrated into the application as a whole. Audacity makes for a great ACX mastering tool because of the open source, purpose made, plugins they have available. Reaper's ability to add SFX chains to tracks without modifying the track directly is pretty incredible. You can both live preview SFX changes, and change settings without having to undo between changes. I miss spectrograph editing when in Reaper. Word is there's an external plugin, but... see point 2.
  - ryantgtg 5y ago
    Maybe stability depends on your use case. For me, Audacity has been much less stable in the last three years than it was 10 years ago. For the past three years, I've had multiple cases where features broke with an update. I (sometimes) record a podcast with a friend, and our flow involves "not updating Audacity anymore, just so we don't have to deal with bs regressions."
- moogly 5y ago
  Reaper is a full-fledged DAW. Audacity is just a barebones audio editor.
- coldacid 5y ago
  Think of it this way: Audacity is nano. Reaper is fully-kitted-out Emacs with everything in ELPA.
gentleman11 5y ago
For those who didn’t see the news, the maintainer of the first major fork was allegedly attacked with a knife by someone from 4chan and stepped down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27765210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27765210 GitHub thread with links to some 4chan posts: https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/99 https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/99
- Drybones 5y ago
  I've been following this all very closely and I have not seen any evidence to show that any physical attack has ever happened, including the alleged police report in Germany, by cookie, which others can not seem to find. So I would not take what cookie says as fact at face value.
  - causi 5y ago
    Seconding this. I perused a few of the threads in question and while there was significant grumbling there wasn't the level of fury usually associated with actual harassments, let alone a physical attack. The harassment-happy lunatics at Kiwi Farms also failed to significantly care about this issue. I will remain highly skeptical until I find non-anecdotal evidence.
- ffffhhhgg 5y ago
  Guy is full of it, he also claimed to receive thousands of messages on his phone but he couldn't provide proof because it crashed. Weird huh? "You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?" Buster to Arthur, 2005.
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  Sneedacity is a better name anyway.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  The guy made it all up.
- rubatuga 5y ago
gtirloni 5y ago
This is probably controversial but I think they've handled it pretty well and offered reasonable options. It seems the people doing the forks think telemetry == adware, no matter what and will never be pursued otherwise.
- syshum 5y ago
  I think this is a classic example of "Once trust is lost is next to impossible to regain" They completely screwed the launch of their "telemetry" collection, so bad that no mount of "reasonableness" is even being considered by many in the community.
  - gtirloni 5y ago
    Agreed. They should have communicated better initially.
  - contravariant 5y ago
    A good reputation arrives on foot and leaves by horse, as the Dutch say.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
plank_time 5y ago
How can they move the source code from open to closed source? They don’t own the contributions. I guess they hope the small contributors won’t mount a legal challenge or they will pay them off to transfer the rights? Seems like a lot of effort for this. What is their ultimate end game? I’m not sure that this is worth all the money they have invested is it?
- EMM_386 5y ago
  > How can they move the source code from open to closed source? They don’t own the contributions. It's in the article. They are having the contributors sign CLAs, which would allow them to do this. The ones who don't sign the CLA, they will re-write that code themselves to get around it.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    I'm not sure whether you can actually do that. The law works on provenance, not on bits.
    - ivanbakel 5y ago
      There are techniques for reproducing copyrighted code in a legal way. The simplest one would be to simply remove all the copyrighted content (assuming it came from minor contributors) and clean-room a replacement.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      Didn't racket do much the same with their switch over to mit?
    - cardiffspaceman 5y ago
      The clean room method breaks the provenance. This is not just writing stuff from scratch like all of us have done at one time or another with our own code.
    - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      Maybe they can use GitHub's Copilot to "rewrite" the code :)
fouric 5y ago
The subject is telemetry, but the article calls it "tracking code". I would be curious to know if the writer actually knows that the telemetry data is enough to track users, or whether they're just exploiting the recent FUD about telemetry. Edit: To clarify, "tracking" means that you're following a particular user around. "Some user pressed the Audacity record button at 13:04:42 Sunday" is not tracking data (although with sufficiently granular data you could do fingerprinting (which is tracking), the countermeasures for which should be obvious) - "User #1934602 pressed the Audacity record button at 13:04:42 Sunday" is tracking, even if it's anonymized. There are different levels of privacy that people care about (e.g. some people are ok with anonymized tracking, while others don't want tracking at all). Conflating them is an underhanded tactic used by people to emotionally manipulate others. Furthermore, "non-tracking statistics" is a category of things that few people care about, versus "anonymous tracking", so conflating these two is particularly egregious.
- falcolas 5y ago
  They swear they are implementing telemetry, but their privacy policy implies tracking. You don’t need to worry about minors or handing personal information over unless you’re storing it. Non-personalized telemetry and crash reports would have been fine to me, but none of their discussions have convinced me that it’s where they would stop (or even really, where they’d start). I’ve since moved to a paid option, and feel good about the move so far.
  - fouric 5y ago
    > They swear they are implementing telemetry, but their privacy policy implies tracking. You don’t need to worry about minors or handing personal information over unless you’re storing it. Good point - reminds me of a principle I recently heard someone espouse, "Disregard whatever promises a corporation/individual in power makes, and only pay attention to their legal constraints."
    - GuB-42 5y ago
      I don't agree with the last statement. Just because you have the legal right to be an asshole doesn't mean you are an asshole. And conversely, the law can be broken, and clever loopholes can be exploited. There may be consequences, but it doesn't you will get repaid personally. For me, privacy policies are just indicative. I try to approach the problem considering incentives, risks and benefits. What are the consequences for breaking the promise, for me, and for the company. For the company, imagine yourself as a shareholder, you want to maximize your profit, you know that by breaking your promise customers will be unhappy, will they go to the competition? is your image a valuable asset? is the short term profit worth it? For you, what is leaked? How will it affect your productivity and security? Can you easily switch to a competitor? At what point too much is too much? If I only cared about legal constraints, I would get into every scam. I mean, advance fee fraud is illegal, so that Nigerian prince cannot take my money, right?
mmastrac 5y ago
I'm looking forward to replacing Audacity with Tenacity. I don't know what's wrong with Muse Group, but virtually all the interactions with the communities of the applications they buy have been negative. The company clearly has some sort of culture issue.
- workedintheory 5y ago
  The actual issue is a bit different than what is perceived. This comes down to the actual definition of community. Our priority is the contributor community and the user community as a WHOLE. Of those complaining on Github and online, not a single one of them have contributed a single line of code to the project. Not even one. Their complaints and concerns are also not very representative of the actual user community (1.2% of users are running Linux, while the overwhelming majority of complaints were from Linux users). So, in addition to the contributor community and the user community as a whole, I do not see any other community. There is this nebulous broader FOSS community that is often referred to. A group demanding to impose their version of idealogical purity on the project, yet not contributing a line of code. But if they are not contributors and not representative of the actual user community... why should the project be forced to cater to the demands of 1.2% of the user base at the cost of convenience to the other 98.8% of users? How absolutely insane would it be for any other software project to be beholden to 1.2% of their actual users? Don't get me wrong, we are extremely committed to FOSS, and our motivations are actually quite ideological - we believe every creator deserves equal/free access to professional quality software. The difference is our ideology is not the same as this very vocal minority that is primarily anti-corporate and whose demands limit capabilities for the overwhelming majority of users.
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    Thanks for replying, Daniel, but your team seems to have a major culture issue regardless and I think the defensive and somewhat random/rambling tone of your comment clearly reflects that. I run OSX/Tenacity, not a Linux user looking for idealogical purity - just a long-time user that sees a lot of red flags on the wall with your acquisitions. Your comments in the musescore-downloader project after the legal threat were simultaneously the first red flag I was made aware of and the first time I had heard of the "Muse Group". For a director of strategy, your strategy and how you deal with the users and fans of the software/good will you've purchased seems less than ideal to this outside observer. Good will was generated by a long-term interaction between the community and the open-source project and you've managed to squander it and apparently continue to do so.
EvanAnderson 5y ago
That the Muse Group is asking for a CLA that permits them to use the code in future non-Free software is cause enough to fork the project and walk away from Audacity. Just because the Muse Group, in its current incarnation, isn't doing anything particularly odious at the present time doesn't mean that a successor entity won't.
- workedintheory 5y ago
  Audacity was, is, and will always be GPL. The CLA does not change this. The CLA simply provides a dual license option for distribution through channels that may not be GPL friendly (ex: app stores). Look at the VLC/Apple issue. This is an insurance policy against something similar in future. CLA is not to be able to create a paid version of Audacity, that is fundamentally against our core beliefs. Creators should have free access to software; the money is in content. In addition, the CLA allows for the ability to share code between the MuseScore and Audacity projects, greatly accelerating development. MuseScore has had a CLA in place from the beginning so it is only possible to share code between projects if similar CLA is in place. The next version of MuseScore will introduce a completely redesigned/rebuilt UX, VST3 support, realtime effects, a redesigned mixer, expanded MIDI support, and a proper sequencer is soon to follow. All of these features have been popular requests of Audacity users and will greatly (and quickly) extend the capabilities of Audacity. Not applying a CLA actually limits the potential of the project (availability on popular devices and using code from MuseScore) more than applying the CLA.
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    That all sounds great. The CLA says: You hereby grant to Company , a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your Contribution and such derivative works. Someday "MUSECY SM LTD, an affiliate of MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar" could be acquired or come under the control of an entity that does not share the "core beliefs" the CLA was drafted under. I wouldn't be comfortable relying on beliefs in lieu of a legal document spelling out exactly what contributed can be used for. The language in the CLA is what matters, not beliefs. I haven't contributed to Audacity so it's not a practical matter for me. I wouldn't contribute to a project with a CLA that grants such a broad license. I'm a minority, to be sure, but there are probably others who feel the same way. I've been burned, in business relationships, by verbally-articulated intentions that weren't codified in contracts and weren't honored. The whole "I thought you said..." and "I meant..." game has made me very wary of accepting terms that aren't articulated as part of a legal agreement. If something is important enough to agree upon it's important enough to put in writing.
mark-wagner 5y ago
Here are the commits I could find that remove the "telemetry:" commit 2a37cd19a022fd6bc63d1c0a403840eb300dfd1c Author: Cookie Engineer <cookiengineer@protonmail.com> Date: Sun Jul 4 10:22:57 2021 +0200 :shit: Remove Breakpad Crash Reports commit 5728dd542fac39c0673dbb1c9d716838a25d69bd Author: Cookie Engineer <cookiengineer@protonmail.com> Date: Sun Jul 4 10:20:24 2021 +0200 :shit: Remove Update Check commit bbf352d36d725335962718f91fc3591a1037f39b Author: Cookie Engineer <cookiengineer@protonmail.com> Date: Sun Jul 4 10:19:04 2021 +0200 :shit: Remove Sentry Reporting
trasz 5y ago
I might be missing something, but what's the problem with just having distros patch out the misfeatures?
- whatshisface 5y ago
  There's a hundred billion distros, so that would be a hundred billion forks.
  - nightfly 5y ago
    You've got like 4-5 major upstream distros though
Nevermark 5y ago
Given the seeming poor faith in some of Muse's explanations for some of the changes, I rechristen Audacity as Mendacity. More seriously, I propose a general disintermediated solution to the general problem of bug verification via automatic reports: 1) All crash reports are opt-in. Reports are created locally after a crash or other event. They are added to a log folder. Users are given tools to examine the report data. Then either: A user can choose to upload any reports they want. A user can have already chosen to upload all reports automatically. Either way, transmissions include nothing but the reports logged for review by users. A condition that can be verified by examination of the programs source. The transparency of what is sent, and requirement of consent, both strongly incentivize reports constructed to be anonymous and limited in terms of any possible nefarious use. 2) The transmission goes to a third party bug identification agent of the users choosing. Users can make their choice based on a public list of such agents and their sites with their public reports. 3) The bug identification party is a third party, separate from the developer group, that works to identify and characterize the bug in the source code. Bug characterization reports are then created that include a list hash values for each of the crash reports that contributed to the report. The bug identification report is then made available publicly so users can be aware of it and developers can use it to identify and implement solutions. The public disclosure of the bug characterization incentivizes a report that reveals little or nothing that could be interpreted as privacy violations. An exception is made if the bug reveals serious security concerns, in which case the bug identification report can be made to developers earlier than public release, with assurances in writing that developers have a certain amount of time to act before the bug identification is made public. Instead of immediately making the bug identification public, only its hash is made public so users can be aware of an anonymous bug fix in progress. Developers in that window of time have the opportunity to fix the bug, determine that a bug fix is not practical or important enough, or they will continue working on the bug, etc., but must be transparent about either within the time frame or be seen to have violated trust. At the end of the window, the bug report agent will publish the bug report, and the developers actions (fix, decision not to fix, decision to take more time, etc). Note that the bug report agent can operate unimpeded without any cooperation from developers if there is none. But developers certainly have some incentive to take the bug reports seriously.

117 points by nickthegreek 5y ago

Holding out some hope for viable forks! I have a machine specifically reserved for attempting builds but I still remain pretty baffled over this wxwidgets business. My previous investigation resulted in failure because the project made reference to a resource that has since made unavailable. I still have a 2.2.x version that I use for day to day recording, flakey, unstable but works if I fiddle enough with it.

dylan604 5y ago
Sounds like any recording equipment of sufficient age. I get a buzz unless I wedge this piece of cardboard into the jack kind of fiddling?
- mousepilot 5y ago
  lol yeah! I seem to have to fiddle with the input source, but it could be any number of things, including my linux installation.

TheChaplain 5y ago

Audacity/Tenacity is a really good application, I hope the fork gets some dedicated maintainers to keep it alive.

AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

I can't tell if "Tone Deaf" was an intended pun or not.

0-_-0 5y ago
I can!
- dylan604 5y ago
  You must have perfect pitch

shams93 5y ago

The thing to do is use rust to build something much better than audacity that is owned by a not for profit foundation like Ghost.

dylan604 5y ago
The thing to do is not be an asshat and fuck up something that was doing just fine before your asshattery.
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  Maybe you guys can find a middle ground here, and not be an asshat with rust? We definitely need rust in this equation.

zwieback 5y ago

Seems like Muse could handle it better but has Audacity kept up? I used it at first but moved on to Reaper quite some time ago.

jan_Inkepa 5y ago
Audacity is pretty good if your focus is editing/tweaking/cutting/splicing individual/small numbers of samples. Haven't at all felt the need for something more featureful still. Ripper seems to have some other niche. ( FWIW, Audacity is a million miles better than it was 10 years ago (aka it's more stable) )
- falcolas 5y ago
  I've used both recently, here's my thoughts. Reaper's non-destructive editing is bloody priceless when compared to Audacity's. Plugins for reaper are... less well integrated into the application as a whole. Audacity makes for a great ACX mastering tool because of the open source, purpose made, plugins they have available. Reaper's ability to add SFX chains to tracks without modifying the track directly is pretty incredible. You can both live preview SFX changes, and change settings without having to undo between changes. I miss spectrograph editing when in Reaper. Word is there's an external plugin, but... see point 2.
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  Maybe stability depends on your use case. For me, Audacity has been much less stable in the last three years than it was 10 years ago. For the past three years, I've had multiple cases where features broke with an update. I (sometimes) record a podcast with a friend, and our flow involves "not updating Audacity anymore, just so we don't have to deal with bs regressions."
moogly 5y ago
Reaper is a full-fledged DAW. Audacity is just a barebones audio editor.
coldacid 5y ago
Think of it this way: Audacity is nano. Reaper is fully-kitted-out Emacs with everything in ELPA.

gentleman11 5y ago

For those who didn’t see the news, the maintainer of the first major fork was allegedly attacked with a knife by someone from 4chan and stepped down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27765210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27765210 GitHub thread with links to some 4chan posts: https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/99 https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/99

Drybones 5y ago
I've been following this all very closely and I have not seen any evidence to show that any physical attack has ever happened, including the alleged police report in Germany, by cookie, which others can not seem to find. So I would not take what cookie says as fact at face value.
- causi 5y ago
  Seconding this. I perused a few of the threads in question and while there was significant grumbling there wasn't the level of fury usually associated with actual harassments, let alone a physical attack. The harassment-happy lunatics at Kiwi Farms also failed to significantly care about this issue. I will remain highly skeptical until I find non-anecdotal evidence.
ffffhhhgg 5y ago
Guy is full of it, he also claimed to receive thousands of messages on his phone but he couldn't provide proof because it crashed. Weird huh? "You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?" Buster to Arthur, 2005.
fuzzer37 5y ago
Sneedacity is a better name anyway.
moralestapia 5y ago
The guy made it all up.
rubatuga 5y ago

gtirloni 5y ago

This is probably controversial but I think they've handled it pretty well and offered reasonable options. It seems the people doing the forks think telemetry == adware, no matter what and will never be pursued otherwise.

syshum 5y ago
I think this is a classic example of "Once trust is lost is next to impossible to regain" They completely screwed the launch of their "telemetry" collection, so bad that no mount of "reasonableness" is even being considered by many in the community.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  Agreed. They should have communicated better initially.
- contravariant 5y ago
  A good reputation arrives on foot and leaves by horse, as the Dutch say.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

plank_time 5y ago

How can they move the source code from open to closed source? They don’t own the contributions. I guess they hope the small contributors won’t mount a legal challenge or they will pay them off to transfer the rights? Seems like a lot of effort for this. What is their ultimate end game? I’m not sure that this is worth all the money they have invested is it?

EMM_386 5y ago
> How can they move the source code from open to closed source? They don’t own the contributions. It's in the article. They are having the contributors sign CLAs, which would allow them to do this. The ones who don't sign the CLA, they will re-write that code themselves to get around it.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  I'm not sure whether you can actually do that. The law works on provenance, not on bits.
  - ivanbakel 5y ago
    There are techniques for reproducing copyrighted code in a legal way. The simplest one would be to simply remove all the copyrighted content (assuming it came from minor contributors) and clean-room a replacement.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    Didn't racket do much the same with their switch over to mit?
  - cardiffspaceman 5y ago
    The clean room method breaks the provenance. This is not just writing stuff from scratch like all of us have done at one time or another with our own code.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    Maybe they can use GitHub's Copilot to "rewrite" the code :)

fouric 5y ago

The subject is telemetry, but the article calls it "tracking code". I would be curious to know if the writer actually knows that the telemetry data is enough to track users, or whether they're just exploiting the recent FUD about telemetry. Edit: To clarify, "tracking" means that you're following a particular user around. "Some user pressed the Audacity record button at 13:04:42 Sunday" is not tracking data (although with sufficiently granular data you could do fingerprinting (which is tracking), the countermeasures for which should be obvious) - "User #1934602 pressed the Audacity record button at 13:04:42 Sunday" is tracking, even if it's anonymized. There are different levels of privacy that people care about (e.g. some people are ok with anonymized tracking, while others don't want tracking at all). Conflating them is an underhanded tactic used by people to emotionally manipulate others. Furthermore, "non-tracking statistics" is a category of things that few people care about, versus "anonymous tracking", so conflating these two is particularly egregious.

falcolas 5y ago
They swear they are implementing telemetry, but their privacy policy implies tracking. You don’t need to worry about minors or handing personal information over unless you’re storing it. Non-personalized telemetry and crash reports would have been fine to me, but none of their discussions have convinced me that it’s where they would stop (or even really, where they’d start). I’ve since moved to a paid option, and feel good about the move so far.
- fouric 5y ago
  > They swear they are implementing telemetry, but their privacy policy implies tracking. You don’t need to worry about minors or handing personal information over unless you’re storing it. Good point - reminds me of a principle I recently heard someone espouse, "Disregard whatever promises a corporation/individual in power makes, and only pay attention to their legal constraints."
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    I don't agree with the last statement. Just because you have the legal right to be an asshole doesn't mean you are an asshole. And conversely, the law can be broken, and clever loopholes can be exploited. There may be consequences, but it doesn't you will get repaid personally. For me, privacy policies are just indicative. I try to approach the problem considering incentives, risks and benefits. What are the consequences for breaking the promise, for me, and for the company. For the company, imagine yourself as a shareholder, you want to maximize your profit, you know that by breaking your promise customers will be unhappy, will they go to the competition? is your image a valuable asset? is the short term profit worth it? For you, what is leaked? How will it affect your productivity and security? Can you easily switch to a competitor? At what point too much is too much? If I only cared about legal constraints, I would get into every scam. I mean, advance fee fraud is illegal, so that Nigerian prince cannot take my money, right?

mmastrac 5y ago

I'm looking forward to replacing Audacity with Tenacity. I don't know what's wrong with Muse Group, but virtually all the interactions with the communities of the applications they buy have been negative. The company clearly has some sort of culture issue.

workedintheory 5y ago
The actual issue is a bit different than what is perceived. This comes down to the actual definition of community. Our priority is the contributor community and the user community as a WHOLE. Of those complaining on Github and online, not a single one of them have contributed a single line of code to the project. Not even one. Their complaints and concerns are also not very representative of the actual user community (1.2% of users are running Linux, while the overwhelming majority of complaints were from Linux users). So, in addition to the contributor community and the user community as a whole, I do not see any other community. There is this nebulous broader FOSS community that is often referred to. A group demanding to impose their version of idealogical purity on the project, yet not contributing a line of code. But if they are not contributors and not representative of the actual user community... why should the project be forced to cater to the demands of 1.2% of the user base at the cost of convenience to the other 98.8% of users? How absolutely insane would it be for any other software project to be beholden to 1.2% of their actual users? Don't get me wrong, we are extremely committed to FOSS, and our motivations are actually quite ideological - we believe every creator deserves equal/free access to professional quality software. The difference is our ideology is not the same as this very vocal minority that is primarily anti-corporate and whose demands limit capabilities for the overwhelming majority of users.
- mmastrac 5y ago
  Thanks for replying, Daniel, but your team seems to have a major culture issue regardless and I think the defensive and somewhat random/rambling tone of your comment clearly reflects that. I run OSX/Tenacity, not a Linux user looking for idealogical purity - just a long-time user that sees a lot of red flags on the wall with your acquisitions. Your comments in the musescore-downloader project after the legal threat were simultaneously the first red flag I was made aware of and the first time I had heard of the "Muse Group". For a director of strategy, your strategy and how you deal with the users and fans of the software/good will you've purchased seems less than ideal to this outside observer. Good will was generated by a long-term interaction between the community and the open-source project and you've managed to squander it and apparently continue to do so.

EvanAnderson 5y ago

That the Muse Group is asking for a CLA that permits them to use the code in future non-Free software is cause enough to fork the project and walk away from Audacity. Just because the Muse Group, in its current incarnation, isn't doing anything particularly odious at the present time doesn't mean that a successor entity won't.

workedintheory 5y ago
Audacity was, is, and will always be GPL. The CLA does not change this. The CLA simply provides a dual license option for distribution through channels that may not be GPL friendly (ex: app stores). Look at the VLC/Apple issue. This is an insurance policy against something similar in future. CLA is not to be able to create a paid version of Audacity, that is fundamentally against our core beliefs. Creators should have free access to software; the money is in content. In addition, the CLA allows for the ability to share code between the MuseScore and Audacity projects, greatly accelerating development. MuseScore has had a CLA in place from the beginning so it is only possible to share code between projects if similar CLA is in place. The next version of MuseScore will introduce a completely redesigned/rebuilt UX, VST3 support, realtime effects, a redesigned mixer, expanded MIDI support, and a proper sequencer is soon to follow. All of these features have been popular requests of Audacity users and will greatly (and quickly) extend the capabilities of Audacity. Not applying a CLA actually limits the potential of the project (availability on popular devices and using code from MuseScore) more than applying the CLA.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  That all sounds great. The CLA says: You hereby grant to Company , a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your Contribution and such derivative works. Someday "MUSECY SM LTD, an affiliate of MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar" could be acquired or come under the control of an entity that does not share the "core beliefs" the CLA was drafted under. I wouldn't be comfortable relying on beliefs in lieu of a legal document spelling out exactly what contributed can be used for. The language in the CLA is what matters, not beliefs. I haven't contributed to Audacity so it's not a practical matter for me. I wouldn't contribute to a project with a CLA that grants such a broad license. I'm a minority, to be sure, but there are probably others who feel the same way. I've been burned, in business relationships, by verbally-articulated intentions that weren't codified in contracts and weren't honored. The whole "I thought you said..." and "I meant..." game has made me very wary of accepting terms that aren't articulated as part of a legal agreement. If something is important enough to agree upon it's important enough to put in writing.

mark-wagner 5y ago

Here are the commits I could find that remove the "telemetry:" commit 2a37cd19a022fd6bc63d1c0a403840eb300dfd1c Author: Cookie Engineer <cookiengineer@protonmail.com> Date: Sun Jul 4 10:22:57 2021 +0200 :shit: Remove Breakpad Crash Reports commit 5728dd542fac39c0673dbb1c9d716838a25d69bd Author: Cookie Engineer <cookiengineer@protonmail.com> Date: Sun Jul 4 10:20:24 2021 +0200 :shit: Remove Update Check commit bbf352d36d725335962718f91fc3591a1037f39b Author: Cookie Engineer <cookiengineer@protonmail.com> Date: Sun Jul 4 10:19:04 2021 +0200 :shit: Remove Sentry Reporting

trasz 5y ago

I might be missing something, but what's the problem with just having distros patch out the misfeatures?

whatshisface 5y ago
There's a hundred billion distros, so that would be a hundred billion forks.
- nightfly 5y ago
  You've got like 4-5 major upstream distros though

Nevermark 5y ago

Given the seeming poor faith in some of Muse's explanations for some of the changes, I rechristen Audacity as Mendacity. More seriously, I propose a general disintermediated solution to the general problem of bug verification via automatic reports: 1) All crash reports are opt-in. Reports are created locally after a crash or other event. They are added to a log folder. Users are given tools to examine the report data. Then either: A user can choose to upload any reports they want. A user can have already chosen to upload all reports automatically. Either way, transmissions include nothing but the reports logged for review by users. A condition that can be verified by examination of the programs source. The transparency of what is sent, and requirement of consent, both strongly incentivize reports constructed to be anonymous and limited in terms of any possible nefarious use. 2) The transmission goes to a third party bug identification agent of the users choosing. Users can make their choice based on a public list of such agents and their sites with their public reports. 3) The bug identification party is a third party, separate from the developer group, that works to identify and characterize the bug in the source code. Bug characterization reports are then created that include a list hash values for each of the crash reports that contributed to the report. The bug identification report is then made available publicly so users can be aware of it and developers can use it to identify and implement solutions. The public disclosure of the bug characterization incentivizes a report that reveals little or nothing that could be interpreted as privacy violations. An exception is made if the bug reveals serious security concerns, in which case the bug identification report can be made to developers earlier than public release, with assurances in writing that developers have a certain amount of time to act before the bug identification is made public. Instead of immediately making the bug identification public, only its hash is made public so users can be aware of an anonymous bug fix in progress. Developers in that window of time have the opportunity to fix the bug, determine that a bug fix is not practical or important enough, or they will continue working on the bug, etc., but must be transparent about either within the time frame or be seen to have violated trust. At the end of the window, the bug report agent will publish the bug report, and the developers actions (fix, decision not to fix, decision to take more time, etc). Note that the bug report agent can operate unimpeded without any cooperation from developers if there is none. But developers certainly have some incentive to take the bug reports seriously.