There are multiple forks currently emerging, it is probably way too early to call any of them promising or anything, especially since some of the original Audacity contributors apparently agreed to signing the CLA and will thus likely continue to work on the original. Here is a link to a promising looking fork: Especially an online update check and crash reporting would probably not have caused such an uproar if it were not for the introduction of the CLA that happened before that (or at the same time). The thing that IMHO really went wrong with the Audacity situation however, is the way these changes, and in particular the CLA, were communicated and handled. This is in contrast to the intention of the GPL-2.0-or-later (Audacity's license) and it is understandable that past and current contributors, as well as users, are upset about such a change. As far as I followed and understood the discussion (I am not a lawyer though), the CLA gives the maintaining company the rights to release closed-source commercial versions of Audacity which contain code from anyone who has contributed and signed the CLA. (4) is the thing that I would be most concerned about. (3) also solves actual problems for which I do not see any other solution that would work equally well. Note that I did not look into exactly what data Audacity is collecting here. (2) is very useful, and as long as the collected statistics are limited to what is actually meaningful to allow for informed development decisions, I frankly see little problem with that. (1) is an absolute requirement, and *EVERY* major software should do that This leaves contributors and users on one side and maintainers on the other side under unequal terms and unequal rights regarding the project's source code and assets.Īpparently, the name and logo of Audacity are now also registered trademarks. I have not followed the precise clauses in the Audacity CLA, however, in general such a CLA gives the maintaining company additional rights compared to what a contribution under the established project's Open Source License already guarantees. What I find more concerning is the change to require signing a CLA to be allowed to contribute to Audacity. CLA (Contributor License Agreement) requirement for Developers Optional automated crash reporting could fix this, at least for some cases. In some cases users also do not want to be bothered at all, which basically results in bugs not getting fixed. This takes about 10 minutes of time from both, us developers as well as from the user. Why? Every time an unexperienced user reports a crash, we have to explain to them to actually provide the crash dump so that we can actually debug the issue. While OpenMPT is currently not (optionally) sending crash reports automatically, we actually do plan to implement that some time in the future. Without removing such features, development would be even slower than it already is (because maintaining unused features for old system takes time and hinders code simplification). Without such statistics, we would not have been able to remove completely unused features in the past. As with Audacity, you are asked before OpenMPT sends this data for the first time, and you can disable that. I have not looked into what exactly Audacity is starting to collect now, however you should be aware that OpenMPT is also collecting basic system statistics. Quote from: Exhale on July 06, 2021, 02:02:34Īudacity is now collecting stuff like your IP address, os, hardware specs and much more. OpenMPT will ask before the first time it does an online update check, and you can of course disable the update check in OpenMPT (as is the case for Audacity). I consider such a feature basically unavoidable for any responsible developer because otherwise users will not get notified about critical security updates for the software. OpenMPT also has an automatic online update check since at least 2011.
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