[PD] [PD-announce] OFFTOPIC: Audacity

[Christof Ressi]

true words!

> 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?
Actually, there has been quite some controversy recently about GitHub's 
CoPilot project:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676939

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287

(I don't necessarily agree with all the criticism, but it definitely is 
an interesting case study.)

> for example, to make
> it impossible for a rogue team member to sell a project's trademark
I think Miller should register the "Pd" trademark before it's too late :-D

Christof

On 05.07.2021 11:33, Andy Farnell wrote:
> 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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