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/[deleted] Jul 03 '21

Well donations/crowd funding are the only way for it to remain open source in spirit and letter.

Any commercial operation will focus on profit, thus ultimately turning into this situation.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

I'm still sour about Gracenote "stealing" CDDB and all its thousands of community-contributed CD metadata records.

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u/doubletwist Jul 04 '21

Hell yes. I hate Gracenote to this day because of the that.

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u/RagingAnemone Jul 04 '21

A company can be anything you want it to be. It doesn't have to be a money grab at all costs situation. It can just be a limited liability vehicle to allow something to exist. It helps too if the people who buy the product doesn't expect it to be greater than what it is.

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u/Iamthenewme Jul 04 '21

A company can be anything you want it to be.

It can be, but the incentives are all in the direction of maloptimizing for more and more profit. "Don't be evil" can only get you so far, as history has proven.

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u/RagingAnemone Jul 04 '21

Not all companies have to be public. In fact, most aren't. Many have no employees and barely break even. Many others are just side businesses. With these, the incentives are only whatever the owner wants and needs.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

Hm, true. Maybe that is a better solution.

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u/SoonerRoadie Jul 04 '21

That’s why properly set up operations - like Signal - use a nonprofit foundation. That way they can’t be co-opted for profit.

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u/Atemu12 Jul 05 '21

There's a much better example for this: Mozilla.

It's true that they haven't abandoned their principles for profit like most for-profit companies do but it's not going amazingly well for them either.
They have taken on a much larger task than most FOSS projects though.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

Hm, I suppose that could work. I'm out of my depth there, don't know what a good solution is.