people like my mom and her boyfriend.
Some elderly people don't have the wits left to tell nonsense from truth, and the emotional fear mongering of the nuts can make it impossible to get life saving medicine to youtubes victims.
All the libertarians and god knows what else in this comment section need to get a sense of perspective. Youtube is literally killing my family!
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Maybe this is all a precursor to the owner turning the Windows version commercial or closed source (making a tiny bit of money off metadata).
Face it, people would still use his version even if everyone in the open sourced community stopped.
I don't feel like they ever made the PROGRAM do anything wrong, but they've got this attitude like "our corporate law team is always right, shut up!"
And it's kind of offensive that they have a law team to go after dumb things like people using their name and serving a copy of their software. Oh and they slander people who do that as spreading malware. They even lie about it. They called one site a malware site, but someone downloaded a copy and did a byte by byte compare and the software is unchanged.
And the "team" made a horrible, insulting privacy policy that they refuse to admit that they don't need and refuse to completely fix, while making more insulting arguments about how asking that children not use their product isn't against the GPL.
Being a corporate boss may be all about being a b*stard, but not if you want to rely on the open source community.
Due to GPL and the fact that the MUSE group added a license requirement that contributions be available for a non-free project, the fork of Audacity can use all of the additions that Audacity gets, but Audacity can't use any of the code that the fork gets.
So the fork will eventually have more than the original, though it might not always get them as quickly.
The previous story was wrong in that the program hadn't been turned into spyware (though that might be only because the battle had already been fought over telemetry) but that there was a new, insultingly broad corporate privacy policy full of unnecessary insulting clauses (like that the purpose of storing your IP address is to give it to courts) and unacceptable GPL breaking license limitations.
And since the company refuses to get rid of the latter, preferring legal mumbo-jumbo the project looks like it's getting forked out of a name and trademark and development group.
Long live Tenacity!
The damage was done by Muse and they're not even addressing one of the main issues, use by children.
I think the result is that people are moving to a fork.
There hasn't been a single word from the company about taking out the children can't use it clause and their contributors or defenders dance around legal interpretations of the GPL instead of admitting violation. Nor dealing with the fact that if they really thought merely the updater was a problem for children to use in just a few countries, they could have warned about using the updater in those countries - or made the updater a separate project.
They have satisfied NO ONE on this issue and it looks like an angry mob is just giving up and moving to another fork - partially because this isn't the first thing that alarmed people and the fork was there before this issue even existed.
Look, it's even gotten a new name, Tenacity.
Someone pointed out that MuseScore has almost an identical privacy policy.
So maybe they're not trying to pull a fast one, maybe they just have a lawyer who screws up GPL licenses and pisses people off with paranoid, unnecessary clauses.
I think the purpose of creating a privacy document now, is so that they don't have to alarm people by making one once they try to turn this into a closed source, money-making program.
And their efforts to ease their user base into this have gone as badly as possible.
As the character being crucified at the end of "The Life of Brian" said in the last words in the film "I said to him, 'Bernie.' I said, 'They'll never make their money back.'"
They got rid of the telemetry BEFORE adding this "privacy policy," so that's a separate issue.
They're ?gaslighting? that it's still necessary.
Latest I heard is that they're going to take out the "giving your information to the authorities" part but maybe not the "minors can't use this program."
It still seems like they're trying to get everyone to agree to an agreement that would let them turn it into any kind of spyware they want, even if they're doing nothing like that yet.
And because this isn't the first time they alarmed their user base, there's already a fork going strong. https://github.com/temporary-a...
https://github.com/temporary-a...
While I think the title of this is a bit clickbait - the program is not spyware, it just has a new license AS IF it were spyware, this is the third time this new owner has alarmed and harmed the user base. Fourth if you count buying the project as if it were an asset.
So there's already a fork going strong.
Currently, AFAIK, the program isn't spyware, it just has a privacy document that you have to agree to that was either written by a paranoid lawyer or by a company planning on tracking more information in the future.
So they can fork the program, leave it entirely the same and just change the privacy document.
The Audacity Team will love that!
The policy says that children under the age of 13 can't be allowed to use their software while it's online - yet the software doesn't CURRENTLY transmit any data that could get them in trouble with child privacy laws. Also this is incompatible with the GPL.
The policy says that they will comply with any court orders to turn your data over to law enforcement - yet the software doesn't CURRENTLY transmit any data to turn over - less than the average web page.
The arguments they give for why this is necessary are totally wrong.
And the arguments they give for how this doesn't violate the GPL are totally wrong.
So either they setting up to invade privacy in the future or they have a clueless corporate lawyer who is completely out of control. Probably the latter, but that doesn't make it acceptable.
Yeah, this is one of two unnecessary and unacceptable things in the privacy policy.
They have no need for a privacy policy with what they're doing NOW, but if they get people accept the policy then they have permission to take any data from you later.
The problem is that the privacy policy that you will have to agree is written as if they're taking real information, which they're not.
And because of that it doesn't allow children to use the program, which is dumb and against the GPL.
So it isn't that the program is spyware, it's that it has a spyware privacy policy.
They need to delete that policy.
Imagine if they start taking enough data to make that policy necessary in the future.
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
