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by zarzavat 1807 days ago
This is a perfect example of how the less money you charge, the worse your users will behave. Audacity is collecting crash reports. Plenty of software collects crash reports. Crash reports are necessary for building reliable desktop software.

For some reason free (gratis) software attracts the most entitled users ever. If I were in charge of Audacity I'd be inclined to charge a $1 "distribution fee" just to weed these users out.

4 comments

I don't think this is an example of entitled users.

I think rather it is rather an example of an external company (Muse group) not understanding the community behind the piece of software they have taken over.

Why is the crash report collecting information about children, and not filtering out the information so only information about the software is collected?
It's just ass-covering legal boilerplate the same as how some software says that you can't use it in a nuclear power facility.
While that is possible, I strongly suspect that in Audacity case it is because they are outsourcing the data collecting to google analytic services, and google uses the personal data as payment for the service.

They could do the data collection themselves and chose not to store personal identifiable information, in which case they can remove the legal boilerplate since it won't be needed. This suggestion naturally already exist in the GitHub issue.

Users will behave? Someone missed the point of libre software. A primary tenet is trust.
Free as in freedom software produces even more entitled users, since we are entitled to fork the project and do it differently.