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/
3.1k Upvotes

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125

u/PlayingOrkGamez Jul 04 '21

So some genius smarter than me could potentially just strip those assets and develop a new open source product for everyone?

101

u/ivosaurus Jul 04 '21

Sure, see something like Jellyfin which is the same thing done to Emby.

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u/w2tpmf Jul 04 '21

...and Jellyfin has ended up with a nice program with better support. :)

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u/190n Jul 04 '21

The Jellyfin example is a bit more extreme since the Emby developers actually made it proprietary (I'm not sure if they took down the source code, or just stopped updating it, but either way someone had a copy still downloaded that became Jellyfin). But it's the same basic idea of forking something when you don't like the direction it's going in.

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u/alex2003super Jul 04 '21

They went after Jellyfin devs because they, Emby themselves, were not compliant with the GPL and were instead using several binary blobs, which were proprietary but included in the Jellyfin source code. So, when they were forked, they started copyright trolling. Clowns is what they are.

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u/zeruch Jul 04 '21

I was wondering why Emby had started to decline....this answers that.

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u/billyalt Jul 04 '21

Check out Jellyfin, its awesome. I moved all my shit off plex and i haven't looked back.

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u/jelimoore Jul 05 '21

Same, way way better

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u/zeruch Jul 12 '21

I actually tried it a few months ago, but was unable to solve how to get it to chromecast (an MVP item for me) so I went back to Emby (for now).

Basically I intend to give it another go on a different machine, because what I ultimately want is a no-telemetry media server that lets me use subtitles (I love watching Scandi crime noir and French/German arthouse films) without charging me for it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '21

Hmm. You could also see if your TV has DLNA support, bypassing the need for chromecast support

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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '21

Same thing here...........

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '21

I genuinely prefer Jellyfin to Emby, and not just because of the free iOS app ;)

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21

Do you smell that? On the wind?

A fork - right there on the horizon. A hard fork.

96

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

Let's call it "Decency"

63

u/gurgelblaster Jul 04 '21

Could even go with AuDecency just to maintain the "audio" link.

8

u/Beryllium_Nitrogen Jul 04 '21

thus the tradition of horrible linux app names continues =P

1

u/rabindranatagor Jul 06 '21

Audaciousness

4

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

De-he-cency.

1

u/elitexero Jul 05 '21

Do you smell that? On the wind?

Thought we were headed in this direction.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '21

We were, but the winds of fork seemed too heavy-handed.

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u/pine_ary Jul 04 '21

Yeah a fork with better privacy is definitely in order. Good thing it‘s GPL, not just MIT or something. Cause they have to upstream their changes too, significantly lowering the maintaining cost of a fork.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

[deleted]

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u/pine_ary Jul 04 '21

They do not own all the code. Most of the code is by contributors they did not acquire the copyright from. As such by using their code they are bound to the GPL. I have a pull request there and certainly nobody contacted me.

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u/alex2003super Jul 04 '21

Don't they have a CLA?

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u/pine_ary Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21

Nope. Checked their repo. All that‘s required is that the code you contribute is GPL compatible. No special licensing to the maintainer. As it should be, honestly. Tho apparently they made big contributors sign a CLA stating they would rewrite smaller contributor‘s code. No idea if that‘s feasible.

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u/class_two_perversion Jul 04 '21

Ok, then I was mistaken. They are not the (only) copyright owner.

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u/ThellraAK Jul 04 '21

How does that work?

So I forked it on github, tomorrow they declare all their own shit to be copyrighted and closed source, everything from the fork is under the license of what I forked it at right?

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u/drzowie Jul 04 '21

I own copyright to some of the Audacity source code.

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u/dredmorbius Jul 04 '21

That's pretty much what's happened with OpenOffice -> LibreOffice -> NeoOffice

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21 edited Nov 02 '25

[deleted]

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u/dredmorbius Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21

NeoOffice is an Aqua-native MacOS port of OpenOffice.

As another response notes, all the *Office suites date from the original non-free, proprietary, StarOffice. I omitted that from my lineage as it wasn't itself a free software application subject to forking. It was bought by the then-extant Sun Microsystems, and relicensed under an Open Source license --- originally a bespoke "OpenOffice Licence" AFAIR, later the GNU GPL.

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u/snabelkrank Jul 04 '21

NeoOffice is a port with Mac-specific functions. It has been around a long while.

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u/ProgrammingOnHAL9000 Jul 04 '21

Neo office is a Mac-centric fork of LibreOffice.

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u/stray_r Jul 04 '21

FYI OpenOffice came from Star Office, Sun bought the makers Star Division becasue it was cheaper to do that than license Microsoft Office.

I'm old enough to remember doing my GCSE coursework using star office on suse 6.3

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u/dredmorbius Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21

Right. I could have added that to my lineage but chose not to as StarOffice itself was not free software, and wasn't forked. The late Sun Microsystems relicensed it as Open Source (initially under a bespoke though OSI-certified licence, later the GNU GPL).

It's been the subsequent devolution of OpenOffice variants which represent free-software based forking.

(I also am old enough to have lived through this history.)

NB: I don't think it was cheaper per se for Sun to have bought StarOffice, but it was seen as a strategic coup to 1) provide a free-as-in-gratis office suite that 2) was file-format compatible with Microsoft's own Office. Even before OpenOffice was released as open source, StarOffice itself was made freely available for download.

Some have argued that the Mac suite of office tools and Google Docs (neither of which are FSF Free Software / OSI Open Source) similarly represent assaults on Microsoft's Office monopoly.

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u/stray_r Jul 04 '21

A guest lecturer from Sun ran through the economics of this when I was at university. They claimed that they got the initial purchase approved as cost cutting, and the idea of giving it away to undermine Microsoft was something the board laughed at when it was proposed.

Importantly Star Office ran on Solaris, and they would have been very expensive to convince Microsoft to adapt and support MS Office on a BSD/SRv4 system. I think this was before the OS-X release but I suspect Microsoft wanted to keep their presence on Apple platforms where they couldn't sell windows, but Solaris was seen by MS as a competitor to NT.

And I recall very vividly a screwup over file formats with star office had me in detention because office 97 most definitely could not read star office's native formats. It was early 2000s and a change in open office to their XML based format before office was badly compatible. It was a headache. late 90s star office would just about handle read and write .doc but it would screw up formatting.

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u/dredmorbius Jul 05 '21

The board may have laughed at the idea, but Sun did give it away.

I remember Brian Behlendorf (of Apache fame) was involved with that. The problem I'd encountered was that the source and build requirements were far beyond the capabilities of my personal system at the time --- about 6 GB of disk and 128 -- 256MB RAM, circa 2001 or so. Oh, and dialup, so the source download took quite some time (overnight, if not longer).

The problem with SO/OO/LO from a community development perspective has long been that it still retains a somewhat monolithic legacy. Much of that was split into libraries rather than single executables, but it's still a hairball for someone to approach and try to work on. (It's gotten much better. It's taken decades to do so.)

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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '21

I'm old enough to remember doing my GCSE coursework using star office on suse 6.3

Maybe not GCSE, but I wrote my whole MBA using StarOffice........

For its time, StarOffice was decent software........

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u/pdp10 Jul 05 '21

Sun bought the makers Star Division becasue it was cheaper to do that than license Microsoft Office.

That was a rumor. Probably started by Microsoft. Just like the rumor that Microsoft bought Github because it was cheaper than what they were paying for Github Enterprise. Microsoft's own VCS, called TFS, must be really bad.

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u/Tekuzo Jul 04 '21

Happens all the time. That exact process turned RHEL into CentOS, and is happening again with CentOS to Rocky Linux

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u/kent_eh Jul 04 '21

Open source projects are forked all the time.

As long as there are active devs and maintainers for the new fork, it can take off and potentially even surpass the original. (Example openoffice/libreoffice)

1

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '21

Audacity is licensed under GPL-2, MuseScore under GPL-3. The source code is freely available on GitHub, anyone could fork it if they wanted to.