Of course! It is because of GDPR and not because of the modification they want to do in the software. They surely had many other solutions to implement features (that users don’t want at all apparently), without restricting the software use.
I don’t know how what you are doing is called, but you are doing it. You take many other examples, to compare them with the initial topic, so that the problem discussed is minimized or discarded… (like when you talk about a problem in your country and the moron next to you reminds you that in country XYZ people are starving and being murdered by their governments, so you should be glad and not complain about initial issue discussed… same tactics, even implying things I never said).
I have seen on Audacity github some people justifying what they were doing with same kind of BS, by comparing Google, Microsoft, Apple, and so on… “see, they are doing it so what now?!”
Anyway they are probably losing important people with their BS, and so far the fork initiated by cookie engineer seem be the future of Audacity, we’ll see how it goes but I wouldn’t bet on Muse now, even if the main contributors are probably contracted with Muse…
A feature to check for updates is something many would want, that way one does not fall behind on said updates, you don’t want your community to be on older versions just because you don’t have a way to notify them about it.
Again, what is wrong here? Please understand how the internet works. At its basic, you connect to a website by having its IP address, that website then sends you content by you giving it your IP address. This is the basic fundamental of the internet. Please tell me how Audacity is supposed to check for updates without having to redesign the entire internet.
Yes, because Google, Microsoft, Apple, Signal, Steam, Openshot, Firefox, Bitwarden, Element, LineageOS, Manjaro, Fedora, and all these products/companies operate on the internet. I am not saying these companies collect a reasonable amount of data, but Audacity certainly is.
They collect your operating system (needed to check what version of Audacity they send you), your audacity version (needed to check if you are up to date), and IP address (for the aforementioned reasons).
It can’t.
On another note: I entirely dislike those programs with their own update-checking on linux - most likely it got installed as a packaged version and will update when a new package is provided by the distro.
These checks are unnecessary and unwelcome.
I agree that they aren’t needed on a distro like Fedora or Manjaro which stay up to date, but these checks can be vital if one is on a distro like Ubuntu that rarely pushes package updates, even if there’s open CVEs against older versions. These checks can be useful in these cases.
The difference is there is no need for Audacity to connect to the internet. The Open Shot link posted only talks about the privacy policy for visiting the website.
The reason Audacity connects to the internet is because it checks for updates online. What is the alternative to you? Having people (especially windows versions) never be notified of when updates come, causing most to be left behind?
That can cause issues and complaints when stuff stops working, which is avoided by this feature.
Yes, because OpenShot does not have a way to automatically check for updates in the application. Causing users on Windows for example to simply be left behind, having to manually check for updates, which the majority likely won’t, especially with maintream applications, there is a reason most applications have a built in way to check for updates, can’t just let it rest on the end user.
Actually I couldn’t care less about windows users and their problems to keep software up to date.
I don’t see this as a strong argument in a linux distro forum…
And if people want to focus on this specific point, as I already said there were other solutions to add these unwanted feature without going against the GPL license or other restriction. Simple example a companion application/service, OPTIONAL, that people would install if they wanted, with its own privacy policy. Pretty sure people with half a brain would find more solutions which wouldn’t require the modifications they are pushing into Audacity (like the privacy policies, the CLA for devs that apparently allow Muse to own the code they contribute, the GPL violation, things like that… but we know what they are doing, bit by bit they add telemetry and other means of doing bad stuff later… wait and see).
Back to topic: I also dunno what to think about this step. There is always some kind of negative taste when software changes “owners” whose intentions are not really clear.
But I guess we will have to see how Manjaro will handle this issue in the future. No need to think about other OS’s in my opinion, since everyone should be responsible for their own choice of OS and deal with them individually.
Here is a video about the new Contributor License Agreement that Muse Group is proposing. Apparently there is no commitment to sticking with libre licensing.
This also affects other Linux distros as mentioned however, especially Debian/Ubuntu based distros which are years out of date. Notifying users of updates can be useful for them since they wouldn’t be notified otherwise.
Highly doubt most users would do that, point of it being included in the application is so that everyone has a way to check for updates easily. If you don’t make updating easy, people won’t do it.
This was already discussed, there is nothing wrong with their privacy policy.
Not what I would consider telemetry, please explain to me how else they are going to serve you the application if they don’t know the OS you have, IP address and hardware? They need the operating system to know which version of the build to send you, they need the hardware to know the architecture (they actually only receive the architecture) and they need the IP address to send you the application. They already knew all of this, just that it was in the website before, causing people to fall behind on updates since they weren’t notified, now this is automatic. Win win.
Like stated before, this is not Audacity having a vendetta against 12 year olds, it’s just that they by the very nature of what they do need the IP address of you, and that is classified as something private. Unless you intend on Audacity distributing itself by CDs through magazines, this isn’t going to change.
Well, yeah, of course you reveal your IP-Address when connecting to their service, however, who says they have to store/collect that information?
Please understand that you don’t have to log said IP-Addresses to offer an update service.
And even if they do: Unless your are an ISP, you cannot relate an IP-Address to a specific person. So I’m wondering where/why that is considered “personal information”. (But ok, that’s another topic)
In case of security related things, updates are pushed out asap by those non rolling distros as well afaik. I agree, on windoze systems it might be necessary to provide some update mechanism. Every shitty app has it’s own updater. Supply chain attacks, come get me…
Now my 2 cents to that whole audacity story:
When a company buys some OSS project FOR MONEY, they certainly want to make MONEY with it…
Now with those two “incidents”: “telemetry” and “desktop privacy policy”, they should have been a more sneaky with that.
To me it seems that the privacy policy was just copied from some template which would cover their asses in ANY event.
(which is somewhat stupid. They should have known the OSS community would go mad, lol)
We’ll see what happens next. Ton’s of forks are on the way.
If you have no record (even if it is short, in this case 24 hours) of when someone accessed your services, nothing is stopping someone from abusing your infrastructure by constantly sending requests non-stop.
How are you supposed to know if someone is accessing the site for the first time in the day, or the thousandth time in the span of a minute if you can’t keep logs?
