Audacity Fork Without Any Sentry Telemetry or Crash Reporting

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • audacity

    Discontinued Tenacity is an easy-to-use, cross-platform multi-track audio editor/recorder for Windows, MacOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems and is developed by a group of volunteers as an open source software that respects user privacy. [Moved to: https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity] (by cookiengineer)

  • audacity

    Audio Editor

    I think we have to see this in context:

    Muse group, a russian for-profit company that seems to have a shell-headquarters in Cyprus (see https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/muse-group), recently acquired Audacity as part of their expansion into the broader audio-production world.

    As a first action, they changed their contributor License Agreement making a future change from a GPL license to a closed-source License possible. (it also allows for dual-licensing a paid version) https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/932

    They currently say they're not going to do that, but if they wanted to (and Muse-group is for-profit) they could without the contributor having any recourse. (They have already confirmed a cloud-service for Audacity, which for me already reeks like "we want to have closed-source tools that use our open-source contributors code").

    Having a CLA isn't a problem in and off itself, for example, as they correctly state: the FSF requires a CLA because they want to license all their stuff as "GPL 3 or above", which is only possible using some CLA-mechanism. (it's also easier for them to defend GPL related lawsuits if they are the copyright holders)

    What MuseGroup forgets to mention, is that they are a for-profit company (https://opencorporates.com/companies/cy/HE411908) while the FSF is a foundation (specifically a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization), which shifts their incentives a lot.

    Now, barely a month later, they add the option of collecting data from users and people aren't happy. It is, at the very least, very tone-deaf/stupid from them to add telemetrie only one month after (IMO) showing their hand for what we can expect for the future.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • sneedacity

    Discontinued Audio Editor [Moved to: https://github.com/Sneeds-Feed-and-Seed/sneedacity] (by formerlychuck)

  • Ammonite-Ops

    Scala Scripting

    Here's an example of a smaller project that added telemetry without suffering a fork:

    https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/Ammonite/issues/607

  • vscodium

    binary releases of VS Code without MS branding/telemetry/licensing

    I hope this type of fork can be converted to repeat the same model that VSCodium uses for VSCode.

    https://vscodium.com/

    VSCodium is not a fork but it also strips out the telemetry that VSCode integrates.

  • calculator

    Windows Calculator: A simple yet powerful calculator that ships with Windows

    Here is the repository for the 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?

  • audacity

    Discontinued Tenacity is an easy-to-use, privacy-friendly, FLOSS, cross-platform multi-track audio editor/recorder for Windows, MacOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. It is developed by a wide group of volunteers. Contributions welcome! [Moved to: https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity] (by temporary-audacity)

    It doesn't help that the maintainer seems a bit new to the role: https://github.com/temporary-audacity/audacity/issues/33.

    If they had waited out the initial storm of upvotes, I think they could have selected the name choice that appealed to crowd without much drama at all. Instead, they overreacted, deleted the first thread, and then started editing and deleting comments in the second. Oof.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts