[_d7dt]

I'm personally not confused, just disappointed. Sadly I've seen far too many FOSS discussions that become overrun with irrationally paranoid rhetoric, sometimes bordering on the reactionary. This stuff is nothing new. You'd think that with the ability to quickly check the code and recompile it to get rid of any unwanted bits, that would make this kind of attitude go away, but for whatever reason it only seems to make it worse.

[duped]

It's usually what happens when a software project has a lawyer involved. Copy left spooks people, anonymous contributions that may or may not be licensed spook people, lack of a privacy policy spooks people, etc.

[zxzax]

In my opinion, if it's desired to have FOSS driven by individual contributors, the legal education aspect for each contributor is just as important as the contributors knowing how to code. Sadly I think some projects are way behind on that.

[fartcannon]

They are! They've forked it. Now you and like-minded folks here can use the spyware version, and the rest of us will use the clean one.

[_d7dt]

Please don't do this, this is needlessly divisive. You don't have to make these (incorrect) assumptions about me and what I will use.

[fartcannon]

The division happened when they added telemetry to Audacity. Forking it is the only move forward. Time will judge the projects on their own merits. In the meantime, we can all at least rest well knowing the chance to defend against greed is available to us because of FOSS.

[_d7dt]

I understand that you feel upset that they added something that you didn't want, but you don't have to continue adding to the division and cynicism. Forking is not the only move, and I would actually suggest against it -- what you want is simply a build with the telemetry disabled. I don't think you want to throw away any other new features that aren't related to the telemetry (and in fact, you may still be able to indirectly benefit from it that way if it leads to some valuable product insights from them). So characterizing this as greed seems to not make so much sense. If they were getting super rich off this and not making any other improvements then maybe you could say that, and I would join you in saying hey, something's not right here, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

[fartcannon]

No, that's much worse. Then we'd exhaust our devs playing wack-a-mole.

[_d7dt]

More exhausting than developing towards an entirely different (and often redundant) feature set without any help from upstream? That's what is usually meant by "fork." If you want the minimal effort option and you don't care about new features or security fixes at all, you can just stick with an old version, no fork is necessary there either.