Published at LXer:

A fellow developer took the effort of creating an initial fork of Audacity which is stripped of all tracking code and telemetry functionality. However, he and the other friends need help in.

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"Audio-edit software Audacity has denied accusations its new privacy policy has transformed it into "possible spyware"."

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57721967

Thanks for the link to the BBC article, but it does not follow the issue very well. Of course we know that Muse corporation is going to say all is well with the new policy changes they made after buying the project.

Try reading the summary at TechRepublic (https://www.techrepublic.com/article...r-a-community/). That's not a site I spend much time with, but their extensive quotations from the actual wording of the new policy seems to belie the "folks just don't understand" tone of the company as quoted by the BBC.

For one thing, code copyrighted under GPL2 is supposed to be freely available to anyone, so how can Muse corp prohibit users based on age and not violate the copyright?

I'm more concerned about the quote from the BBC article about needed user's personally identifying data so that DDOS events can be investigated: until this new telemetry code was added after they purchased the project, Audacity was completely incapable of connecting to or using the internet. In what way does that make it a DDOS tool? Here's the relevant portion of the BBC article:

"And while European user data is stored in Europe, it may "occasionally" share data with its headquarters in Russia.

This was to monitor signs of potential distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS), when a platform is deliberately flooded with data requests intended to knock it offline, Mr Ray said."

Anyway, this extremely volatile situation is very disturbing. I've always assumed that Audacity was essentially alone in it's category due to the complexity of sound editing, and the size of the interested community. Well, I was clearly wrong about the second part - the article estimates 100,000,000 users! And the first announced fork already attracted so much violent backlash that the responsible party has walked away to protect his family, after contacting the police:
https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/99

So, I'm going to keep a close watch on what's brewing here, hoping that a safe and sane fork eventually survives this maelstrom.