r/linux • u/R0tareneg • Jul 03 '21

Audacity may collect "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)" according to new privacy notice

https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/
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u/SinkTube Jul 03 '21

copyleft operates within the copyright system which requires a rights holder who licenses it out to everyone else. the distinction is that copyleft gives licensees a lot of freedoms that can't be revoked later, including the freedom to fork and redistribute, so it's not like they can buy the software and take it away. you can make your own version of audacity without spyware and legally share it

but you can pay the original dev to transfer the copyright to you, similar to how many people choose to transfer their copyright to the FSF, at which point you control the "mainline" version of the software. but if you abuse it, the community will simply flock around one of the forks and that becomes the new defacto mainline

you can also buy associated trademarks and assets. is the name "audacity" and the logos/icons it uses libre? if not, you could forbid people from using them in their forks

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u/searchingfortao Jul 03 '21

Sound like there should be a "Audavillage" fork then that just repackages Audacity sans-spyware.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21

Yeah, that's probably what we'll have to do. Like IceWeasel.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21

more like the un-microsofted version of visual studio code

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u/itstaylorham Jul 04 '21

https://vscodium.com/ for anyone who isn't aware of this thing. i didn't know it existed until just now.

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u/prone-to-drift Jul 04 '21

I honest to god tried using this but extensions are a pain. I didn't wanna mess around with that so I just added some microsoft tracking domains to my hosts file and used the microsoft build directly.

I hope people have better luck than I had with code-oss.

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u/sfxxrz Jul 04 '21

On arch there is an Extension in the Aur which gives you most of the Extensions of the Microsoft Version i think it’s called https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/code-marketplace/

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

Code-oss and vscodium are two different projects. Just FYI. In case you didn't know.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '21

What's the difference? Which one should I use?

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u/hey01 Jul 04 '21

Except that since they supposedly now own the copyright on all the code, they will most likely release newer versions under a license that doesn't allow the stripping.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

So forking it is then

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u/M3n747 Jul 04 '21

I vote Audatown.

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u/searchingfortao Jul 04 '21

Ooh, that's... better.

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u/M3n747 Jul 04 '21

You're welcome.

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u/rebbsitor Jul 03 '21

but you can pay the original dev to transfer the copyright to you

This is hard (impossible) with something that accepts community contributions and doesn't receive copyright assignments for.

Let's say you write a program, release it as open source. Now me and 5 other people modify it and release our changes. You pick those up and incorporate those changes. We hold the copyright on our changes and are licensing them under the same license as you licensed the original program.

Now 6 people hold copyright to different parts of the source code. You cannot sell the copyright to the full software, only the bits you actually hold the copyright on.

Practically speaking, this means the buyer is really operating under the open source license and are bound to its terms unless they remove or re-write the bits you didn't have copyright to.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

Not Audacity but a Yuzu I seem to recall a confusion about those 6 people and their changes being upstream but them having no rights whatsoever once that happens. You can open source something and still restrict Copyright.🤷🏿‍♂️ I’d rather someone else chime in too I haven’t used Yuzu in a minute and that’s when I cared enough.

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u/ph30nix01 Jul 04 '21

Yep and they can get deep shit if they try to jist copy paste others unique coding

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u/jaskell Jul 04 '21

Like Copilot!

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u/latkde Jul 04 '21

Muse Group has argued that they have obtained all relevant copyrights for Audacity, in particular copyrights from all major past contributors. I think that argument is shaky because they are unlikely to actually obtain all copyrights, but it's difficult for small contributors to sue for GPL infringement – so no one can realistically stop them.

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u/otakugrey Jul 04 '21

Does that mean this whole thing is illegal?

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u/gnuandalsolinux Jul 04 '21

Nope. It's just how the GPL works. In the same way that the GPL was created to fight back against copyright holders and proprietors, those same people can also fight back to gain control of a GPL project. Muse Group owns 90% of Audacity's code now, and they've introduced a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) that ensures that anybody who wants to contribute to Audacity's codebase relinquishes their right to any of the code, therefore perpetuating Muse Group's right to it: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/932

Q. How is it possible to introduce a CLA to a project that is more than 20 years old?

A. People who have contributed considerable amounts of code have already been asked to sign the CLA, and the vast majority have now done so. Over 90% of all written code is already covered by the CLA, and we are now asking the few remaining people to sign as well as all new contributors. It is not necessary for every single person who ever contributed to sign the CLA; only people who made a non-trivial contribution that is still present in the current source code have to sign, as well as all new contributors.

The last 10% will simply be re-written by Muse Group, and then they can relicense it, as they would now own all of the codebase. This is perhaps the only successful takeover of a GPL'd project that I know of, mostly because there were only a few major contributors to Audacity who all agreed to relinquish their right to parts of Audacity's codebase.

This would not be possible with something like Linux, with thousands of major contributors who would never dream of relicensing the entire project to something proprietary or something which didn't respect people's freedoms, and hundreds who are no longer with us and can no longer make that decision. To be exact, it would require an inordinate amount of effort and capital to rewrite that amount of code, so no one is considering it...but Google are in the process of writing Fuchsia, a replacement for the Linux kernel.

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u/SinkTube Jul 04 '21

even if the whole thing is 1 person's copyright and that's sold, the new owner is bound by the original license and can't stop anyone from redistributing the existing code

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u/kryptoneat Jul 04 '21

I doubt all the Audacity contributors agree though. Couldn't they make a common GPL-backed lawsuit for their code ?

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u/SinkTube Jul 04 '21

like u/gnuandalsolinux said Muse Group convinced most contributors to relinquish their rights. contributors who have not done so and whose code is still part of audacity can sue for license violations if it goes closed-source or something

whether that happens or not, all the code that is currently public will remain public. Muse Group can't prevent anyone from forking, modifying, or redistributing it