[PD] [PD-announce] OFFTOPIC: Audacity

[Andy Farnell]

I've said here and in other forums, there's much naivete around
project governance in OSS. The FSF (hopefully in its refreshed
configuration) really could offer some advisory guidelines. In today's
predatory environment even sole developers need to think defensively
around trademarks, patents, security and resilience of dev assets.
FOSS organisations need more careful stucturing, for example, to make
it impossible for a rogue team member to sell a project's trademark
(as happened to Freenode.net, and now it seems Audacity).

Great as the GPL is, a licence alone is not enough. 

Interestingly, the first reference in this discussion is to
github.com. That site is itself a trap that will one day stop
tolerating dissent, surely you all realise that?

Following the lamentable tale on HN, it seems audacity, a stand-alone
editor that has no business running network code, is being
booby-trapped with "telemetry for bug reports".  That thin-end will
allow a wedge that soon reports back "usage statistics", (like plugin
lists that allow unique user fingerprinting), and eventually acts as a
key activation for DRM and other corporate shitfuckery.

Unless the dev team rebel and tear it out right now I can see
freenode.net happening twice this year.

My opinion is, Audacity ain't a great audio editor anyway. Most of the
UI issues are not bugs but entrenched design decisions.  I've always
felt it was made by people who don't much real-world audio
edtiting.  Running an old copy of CoolEdit98 under Wine or Roger
Dannenberg's Snd reminds me what a real audio editor should feel
like.

A good fork would be one that stripped a lot of the features _out_
leaving a faster, more focused and less bloated editor called "Aud", or
"Acity" to reflect that half the baggage has been dumped.

Of course most people don't use tools as I do, and the sad thing is
that Audacity is a mainstay of the educational world. Probably
millions of students rely on it for trimming, compression and file
format conversion. It's the first thing I suggest to all my students
on less technical courses as an easy-start editor. It seems a shame to
throw that all away because of the greed of a few.



Andy

(new book: https://digitavegan.net)





On Sun, Jul 04, 2021 at 11:57:37PM +0200, Christof Ressi wrote:
> Indeed. This GitHub issue is very enlightening:
> https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/880
> 
> Nobody knows who Muse Group really is. Their website doesn't even have an
> impressium: https://mu.se/
> 
> What seems to have happened is that Muse Group bought the Audacity
> trademark, made all (relevant) former contributors sign a CLA and obviously
> put the current developers under a NDA.
> 
> They did the same thing with MuseScore.
> 
> :-/
> 
> On 04.07.2021 22:04, Julian Brooks wrote:
> >Bad stuff ongoing with Audacity:
> >https://fosspost.org/audacity-is-now-a-spyware/
> ><https://fosspost.org/audacity-is-now-a-spyware/>
> >
> >Jb
> >
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