19 ms·

Speaking of which, how did that "audacity isn't FOSS" fuss end up? A quick search shows tenacity is still active ( https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity ht

Speaking of which, how did that "audacity isn't FOSS" fuss end up? A quick search shows tenacity is still active ( https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity ) but I have no idea how much the projects kept interacting after the initial debate

RockRobotRock 3y ago
seems like its because they tried to add basic telemetry?
- KMnO4 3y ago
  Yes, they updated their privacy and data collection policy. That’s kinda the blessing and the curse of FOSS. You absolutely can fork the repo, remove the telemetry, and republish it as a new app. But fragmentation is confusing, requires a lot of maintenance, and really I’m not sure it was worth it. Those who are particularly conscious about the telemetry can block it with a single line in /etc/hosts.
  - swyx 3y ago
    seriously, people who get outraged over telemetry should temper their anger. most of the time the telemetry isn't used to sell your data or something nefarious (its quite useless if you dont even have a login, like audacity does), its just being used to try to improve the product for you. i write this as someone who's been involved in one too many debates about the perils of introducing telemetry to a commercial open source thing because "HN would tear us apart"
    - mehlmao 3y ago
      The developers who acquired Audacity had previously threatened to have someone deported to China and tortured over their API. https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/muse_group_deportation_threat/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/muse_group_deportatio...
      - averageRoyalty 3y ago
        I did some basic digging and this is at best a misrepresentation[1]. The original email appears to indicate they intended to contact CCP authorities. The inference I took is that they believed the developer was in China. Later they stated that violation of law in Canada could result in revocation of visa. So "threated to have someone deported" is maybe a stretch, "tortuted" is pretty untrue. The github issue appears to show a pretty reasonable attempt by both parties to move forward. 1. https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issuecomment-882450335 https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issu...
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        mehlmao 3y ago
        Musegroup's head of strategy posted the following and removed it later after backlash: "If found in violation of laws, residency may be revoked and he may be deported to his home country. This becomes even further complicated given another repo of his – 'Fuck 学习强国', which is highly critical of the Chinese government. Were he deported to China, who knows how he may be received." Hard to take that as anything but a threat. My point stands that Musegroup has proven that they should not be trusted with any information about users.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
      The problem is you never know what they will share. Today, they just want to track which buttons get clicked. Tomorrow, maybe some eager PM wants to upload all of my environment variables. If it can fully run locally on my machine, I do not want it sending anything external. Lastly, as an abused Firefox user, it seems that telemetry is only ever used to justify removing features I like.
      - djur 3y ago
        The problem with this argument is that there's no reason to believe a slippery slope exists. It's just as easy to go from "no tracking" to "digital colonoscopy" as it is when your starting point is "anonymized crash reporting". Any new release of any software could start spying on you.
      - saintmatthieu 3y ago
        > it seems that telemetry is only ever used to justify removing features I like If the removed features are only features you like, then they probably aren't doing things right... The one most relevant purpose for telemetry I see for Audacity is precisely preventing this from happening, meanwhile fostering a more vigorous growth of the repo by cutting off dead branches. Audacity is over 20 years of development of features, some of which we every now and again wonder if they're still used. Not knowing, we try our best maintaining these, which slows down Development, QA and Design in delivering features that are relevant now.
    - sneak 3y ago
      It’s a consent violation. That always warrants anger. The purpose for violating consent is irrelevant. Using a user’s computer to spy on them when they don’t want it to is extremely rude, in all cases, even if the surveillance data is thrown away and never used. Developers who implement such features should be named and highlighted and should have trouble finding new jobs. It’s shady and unethical to make such software, doing so should be a black mark on one’s professional record, just like stealing. It is literally malware. Your assumption that violating consent is ok as long as it isn’t “nefarious” is the problem.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - saint_yossarian 3y ago
    Looks like there's also a build flag to disable all networking, which the Debian package sets: https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/audacity/-/commit/1dd028e24330d9e541ba0f9fa51f474c5407ae21 https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/audacity/-/commit/1...
    - bscphil 3y ago
      As does Arch Linux: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/audacity/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/au... Distributions and open source maintainers looking out for their users, once again.
      - radarsat1 3y ago
        Sure, but it's not even enabled by default in the upstream repository. Maybe that's a result of all the fuss about it, but nonetheless.. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/6c2e8a2377542d67226b03c40333b14ae1c1b3ee/CMakeLists.txt#L225 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/6c2e8a2377542d6722...
      - djur 3y ago
        The primary network activity Audacity does is checking for updates, which you don't want in a distro-packaged binary in any case. I don't know if it's "looking out for users".
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  And marking it PG-13 :-D
- nemetroid 3y ago
  The reason for the "non-FOSS" accusations was not related to the introduction of telemetry, but the new CLA. But they did this around the same time they tried to add (but backed out) telemetry, so people tend to confuse the two events. Which I guess is helpful for Muse. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/932 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/932
Conscat 3y ago
Tenacity is distinct in more fundamental ways that just not being copyright infringement (for one, it uses a different GUI toolkit and is way slower and buggier), so its appeal at this point isn't closely related to whether people like Muse or not.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Would be nice with a fork which followed Audacity closely but without the telemetry. (Like VS Codium I suppose.)
  - Eduard 3y ago
    Auditorium :)
  - LWinterberg 3y ago
    This fork exists and it's called Audacity. Audacity doesn't have any telemetry, the PR never got merged. And any online functionality it does have (automatic update checking, crash reporting) can be turned off.
    - nyanpasu64 3y ago
      Perhaps remove the "Share Audio" ~~ad~~ button in the toolbar?
      - LWinterberg 3y ago
        Feel free to! View > Toolbars > Share Audio toolbar disables it. Compiling from source has it disabled by default.
0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
I recently needed to do some sound editing, and I had a dreadful experience with Tenacity. Running on PopOS, I encountered many crashes doing simple manipulations. Even trying to scroll while playing audio ostensibly resulted in a crash. Small favor, the restore-unsaved-work functionality did save me several times. Eventually, I held my nose and ran Audacity in a VM, and not a single crash.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Running in a VM is drastic. I'd go for bubblewrap, or a plain container. Can cut network access all right.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    Indeed, there are other options, but a VM is the only one in which I feel safe that I do not screw up the configuration somehow. Docker can punch through a firewall, what other “obvious” settings exist in whatever lockdown option I pick? Barring a VM escape exploit, I know that my private data is not getting exposed.
    - Intralexical 3y ago
      Ardour's pro-grade, isn't it? Maybe not as easy to start with as Audacity, but surely easier and more useful to set up than Audacity in a VM.
      - djur 3y ago
        If you don't trust Audacity, why would you trust Ardour?
- djur 3y ago
  Why would you run Audacity in a VM?
Arnavion 3y ago
FWIW it was never an issue for Linux distribution packages of Audacity. It was behind a compile-time flag so distro build scripts could have been changed to disable the telemetry. In fact the flag was disabled by default, so distro build scripts didn't even need to change and would've continued producing telemetry-free binaries. Only binaries from Audacity themselves had the telemetry, which (as usual) is why you should never use upstream binaries.
LWinterberg 3y ago
It's complete BS. Audacity never stopped being open source and currently has update checking and crash reporting - it does not have any telemetry.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  And telemetry isn't even a bad thing. Firefox has had more extensive telemetry than Audacity for years. This idea that it's evil and nefarious to collect voluntary statistics on program usage to better target (limited) development resources is quite eye-rolling
  - mlry 3y ago
    How about calling it evil and nefarious to speak about voluntary statistics when it is not opt-in, but opt-out? There are users out there who will agree to anything. But I doubt those are the ones that really should direct the evolution of a piece of software. And almost no users will agree to telemetry when openly asked what we are talking about. And I have yet to be convinced that telemetry is actually as useful as proclaimed. I don't really see Firefox moving in a direction that enhances user experience based on gathered data. Windows, anyone?
    - LWinterberg 3y ago
      In the context of Audacity, telemetry already would have been useful: A previous version removed the cut/copy/paste buttons, thinking that people normally used ctrl+x/c/v. However, in practice this turned out to only be half-true: while cutting in the context of cut-and-paste may have been used with shortcuts, a fairly significant number of Audacity users actually used "the scissors" to cut (as in: delete) content and came to the forum to complain because their core workflow was broken. This sort of situation is bad for everyone: People get their workflow broken, devs need to do work to remove and later reinstate a feature, and privacy-minded people who want to complain need to share name and email to sign up on a forum for an account. In addition, it is hard to gauge what significance the forum posts have: If 100 people are complaining, are they a vocal minority of the millions of users Audacity has, or are they representative of most people? This is especially true considering Audacity is the sort of casual "useful toolbox USB stick" program for many people - they're not going to closely follow development and updates or participate in polls or surveys, simply because it's not a part of their life they care about that much. This situation is different for something like Blender in which the tool tends to be a major part of your hobby or job if you use it at all. Although, saying that: This is a hypothesis based on my perception which cannot be verified as neither Blender nor Audacity track this data. With telemetry (which for Audacity would have been a "do you want telemetry yes/no"-type dialog on first launch) the question "does anyone actually use the cut/copy/paste buttons?" would have been answered with "actually, yes", things would have been done differently, nobody's workflows would have been broken, and privacy-minded folks would not have needed to put emails on a forum which may or may not get hacked in the future. In some sense, even people who disable telemetry benefit from telemetry being an option - assuming that their needs are in aggregate otherwise similar to the average user.

RockRobotRock 3y ago

seems like its because they tried to add basic telemetry?

KMnO4 3y ago
Yes, they updated their privacy and data collection policy. That’s kinda the blessing and the curse of FOSS. You absolutely can fork the repo, remove the telemetry, and republish it as a new app. But fragmentation is confusing, requires a lot of maintenance, and really I’m not sure it was worth it. Those who are particularly conscious about the telemetry can block it with a single line in /etc/hosts.
- swyx 3y ago
  seriously, people who get outraged over telemetry should temper their anger. most of the time the telemetry isn't used to sell your data or something nefarious (its quite useless if you dont even have a login, like audacity does), its just being used to try to improve the product for you. i write this as someone who's been involved in one too many debates about the perils of introducing telemetry to a commercial open source thing because "HN would tear us apart"
  - mehlmao 3y ago
    The developers who acquired Audacity had previously threatened to have someone deported to China and tortured over their API. https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/muse_group_deportation_threat/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/muse_group_deportatio...
    - averageRoyalty 3y ago
      I did some basic digging and this is at best a misrepresentation[1]. The original email appears to indicate they intended to contact CCP authorities. The inference I took is that they believed the developer was in China. Later they stated that violation of law in Canada could result in revocation of visa. So "threated to have someone deported" is maybe a stretch, "tortuted" is pretty untrue. The github issue appears to show a pretty reasonable attempt by both parties to move forward. 1. https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issuecomment-882450335 https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issu...
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - mehlmao 3y ago
        Musegroup's head of strategy posted the following and removed it later after backlash: "If found in violation of laws, residency may be revoked and he may be deported to his home country. This becomes even further complicated given another repo of his – 'Fuck 学习强国', which is highly critical of the Chinese government. Were he deported to China, who knows how he may be received." Hard to take that as anything but a threat. My point stands that Musegroup has proven that they should not be trusted with any information about users.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    The problem is you never know what they will share. Today, they just want to track which buttons get clicked. Tomorrow, maybe some eager PM wants to upload all of my environment variables. If it can fully run locally on my machine, I do not want it sending anything external. Lastly, as an abused Firefox user, it seems that telemetry is only ever used to justify removing features I like.
    - djur 3y ago
      The problem with this argument is that there's no reason to believe a slippery slope exists. It's just as easy to go from "no tracking" to "digital colonoscopy" as it is when your starting point is "anonymized crash reporting". Any new release of any software could start spying on you.
    - saintmatthieu 3y ago
      > it seems that telemetry is only ever used to justify removing features I like If the removed features are only features you like, then they probably aren't doing things right... The one most relevant purpose for telemetry I see for Audacity is precisely preventing this from happening, meanwhile fostering a more vigorous growth of the repo by cutting off dead branches. Audacity is over 20 years of development of features, some of which we every now and again wonder if they're still used. Not knowing, we try our best maintaining these, which slows down Development, QA and Design in delivering features that are relevant now.
  - sneak 3y ago
    It’s a consent violation. That always warrants anger. The purpose for violating consent is irrelevant. Using a user’s computer to spy on them when they don’t want it to is extremely rude, in all cases, even if the surveillance data is thrown away and never used. Developers who implement such features should be named and highlighted and should have trouble finding new jobs. It’s shady and unethical to make such software, doing so should be a black mark on one’s professional record, just like stealing. It is literally malware. Your assumption that violating consent is ok as long as it isn’t “nefarious” is the problem.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- saint_yossarian 3y ago
  Looks like there's also a build flag to disable all networking, which the Debian package sets: https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/audacity/-/commit/1dd028e24330d9e541ba0f9fa51f474c5407ae21 https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/audacity/-/commit/1...
  - bscphil 3y ago
    As does Arch Linux: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/audacity/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/au... Distributions and open source maintainers looking out for their users, once again.
    - radarsat1 3y ago
      Sure, but it's not even enabled by default in the upstream repository. Maybe that's a result of all the fuss about it, but nonetheless.. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/6c2e8a2377542d67226b03c40333b14ae1c1b3ee/CMakeLists.txt#L225 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/6c2e8a2377542d6722...
    - djur 3y ago
      The primary network activity Audacity does is checking for updates, which you don't want in a distro-packaged binary in any case. I don't know if it's "looking out for users".
actionfromafar 3y ago
And marking it PG-13 :-D
nemetroid 3y ago
The reason for the "non-FOSS" accusations was not related to the introduction of telemetry, but the new CLA. But they did this around the same time they tried to add (but backed out) telemetry, so people tend to confuse the two events. Which I guess is helpful for Muse. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/932 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/932

Conscat 3y ago

Tenacity is distinct in more fundamental ways that just not being copyright infringement (for one, it uses a different GUI toolkit and is way slower and buggier), so its appeal at this point isn't closely related to whether people like Muse or not.

actionfromafar 3y ago
Would be nice with a fork which followed Audacity closely but without the telemetry. (Like VS Codium I suppose.)
- Eduard 3y ago
  Auditorium :)
- LWinterberg 3y ago
  This fork exists and it's called Audacity. Audacity doesn't have any telemetry, the PR never got merged. And any online functionality it does have (automatic update checking, crash reporting) can be turned off.
  - nyanpasu64 3y ago
    Perhaps remove the "Share Audio" ~~ad~~ button in the toolbar?
    - LWinterberg 3y ago
      Feel free to! View > Toolbars > Share Audio toolbar disables it. Compiling from source has it disabled by default.

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago

I recently needed to do some sound editing, and I had a dreadful experience with Tenacity. Running on PopOS, I encountered many crashes doing simple manipulations. Even trying to scroll while playing audio ostensibly resulted in a crash. Small favor, the restore-unsaved-work functionality did save me several times. Eventually, I held my nose and ran Audacity in a VM, and not a single crash.

nine_k 3y ago
Running in a VM is drastic. I'd go for bubblewrap, or a plain container. Can cut network access all right.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Indeed, there are other options, but a VM is the only one in which I feel safe that I do not screw up the configuration somehow. Docker can punch through a firewall, what other “obvious” settings exist in whatever lockdown option I pick? Barring a VM escape exploit, I know that my private data is not getting exposed.
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    Ardour's pro-grade, isn't it? Maybe not as easy to start with as Audacity, but surely easier and more useful to set up than Audacity in a VM.
    - djur 3y ago
      If you don't trust Audacity, why would you trust Ardour?
djur 3y ago
Why would you run Audacity in a VM?

Arnavion 3y ago

FWIW it was never an issue for Linux distribution packages of Audacity. It was behind a compile-time flag so distro build scripts could have been changed to disable the telemetry. In fact the flag was disabled by default, so distro build scripts didn't even need to change and would've continued producing telemetry-free binaries. Only binaries from Audacity themselves had the telemetry, which (as usual) is why you should never use upstream binaries.

LWinterberg 3y ago

It's complete BS. Audacity never stopped being open source and currently has update checking and crash reporting - it does not have any telemetry.

didntcheck 3y ago
And telemetry isn't even a bad thing. Firefox has had more extensive telemetry than Audacity for years. This idea that it's evil and nefarious to collect voluntary statistics on program usage to better target (limited) development resources is quite eye-rolling
- mlry 3y ago
  How about calling it evil and nefarious to speak about voluntary statistics when it is not opt-in, but opt-out? There are users out there who will agree to anything. But I doubt those are the ones that really should direct the evolution of a piece of software. And almost no users will agree to telemetry when openly asked what we are talking about. And I have yet to be convinced that telemetry is actually as useful as proclaimed. I don't really see Firefox moving in a direction that enhances user experience based on gathered data. Windows, anyone?
  - LWinterberg 3y ago
    In the context of Audacity, telemetry already would have been useful: A previous version removed the cut/copy/paste buttons, thinking that people normally used ctrl+x/c/v. However, in practice this turned out to only be half-true: while cutting in the context of cut-and-paste may have been used with shortcuts, a fairly significant number of Audacity users actually used "the scissors" to cut (as in: delete) content and came to the forum to complain because their core workflow was broken. This sort of situation is bad for everyone: People get their workflow broken, devs need to do work to remove and later reinstate a feature, and privacy-minded people who want to complain need to share name and email to sign up on a forum for an account. In addition, it is hard to gauge what significance the forum posts have: If 100 people are complaining, are they a vocal minority of the millions of users Audacity has, or are they representative of most people? This is especially true considering Audacity is the sort of casual "useful toolbox USB stick" program for many people - they're not going to closely follow development and updates or participate in polls or surveys, simply because it's not a part of their life they care about that much. This situation is different for something like Blender in which the tool tends to be a major part of your hobby or job if you use it at all. Although, saying that: This is a hypothesis based on my perception which cannot be verified as neither Blender nor Audacity track this data. With telemetry (which for Audacity would have been a "do you want telemetry yes/no"-type dialog on first launch) the question "does anyone actually use the cut/copy/paste buttons?" would have been answered with "actually, yes", things would have been done differently, nobody's workflows would have been broken, and privacy-minded folks would not have needed to put emails on a forum which may or may not get hacked in the future. In some sense, even people who disable telemetry benefit from telemetry being an option - assuming that their needs are in aggregate otherwise similar to the average user.