Audacity drama continues
Anger over Audacity’s use of telemetry reaches boiling point as 4chan gets involved.
Back in LXF278 we reported on how
Audacity, the open-source audio editor, was acquired by the Muse Group. Although promising to keep Audacity free and open, the company added optional telemetry to the application which would upload certain data (which is detailed in the Audacity sub-Reddit at
https://bit.ly/lxf280audacityreddit) to thirdparties, including Google and Yandex.
This prompted a fierce backlash, and while the company swiftly backtracked and apologised
(https://bit.ly/lxf280audacityapol), the damage was done. It didn’t help that there was also a (now dropped) change to the privacy policy to prevent people under 13 from using the software, which many felt breached the GNU General Public Licence 2, which Audacity is published under. Fifty-plus forks of Audacity were then created, with one of the most popular being
Tenacity (https://bit.ly/lxf280tenacity). When the fork was created by a programmer going by the name “cookiengineer”, a poll was set up to try and find a new name. Unfortunately, this poll was spotted by users of 4chan, who then engineered to have the name Sneedacity (a reference to a Simpsons joke) win. This led cookiengineer, who felt the poll was manipulated, maliciously to remove it and go with Tenacity.
While this should have been the end of it, 4chan users allegedly decided instead to harass cookiengineer which, the programmer claims, included finding their real name and address and threatening him. This led to cookiengineer announcing (https://bit.ly/3idhUPd) that they’re stepping down from the Tenacity project.