it’s clear the sakurina/doolittle/felix triangulated position is approved, i accept this viewpoint and wanted to offer my counterpoint, so hopefully it can be taken as it is intended
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if you piss off your entire userbase you may, in fact, have made some error
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I mean, I think there are lots of reasons that people now get irrationally upset about any mention of google, there is a rich literature there that ideally should be even richer and better-understood
but the main problem here is that audacity is one of very few projects lingering in the realm of “windows XP shit” which means that its userbase is functionally opposed to any action that can be taken in 2021. the maintainers have made the critical mistake of maintaining the software.
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and in fairness this is the same mistake made by people who continue to produce new episodes of the simpsons so it’s not just limited to tech
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It’s not a question of trust, trust is a separate issue to this pull request.
Audacity is open source. The code for all this shit is out in the open. If you don’t trust their builds, build your own with the telemetry flag set to off. If you want to see exactly what is being sent or if your opt-out preference/the telemetry build flag is being respected, go look at the code.
If you are offended by what is being sent, you have a legitimate grounds to complain about what is being sent and can make an actual objection to this pull request.
If you find a place where the build flag or preference check are being skipped, it’s a bug and you can report it, or submit your own patch to fix it.
Everything there is to distrust with this patch is in the open, and from a developer perspective, it seems reasonably implemented in a way that has better defaults than most software shipping today with telemetry.
I don’t trust Muse Group either, and I think they will inevitably fuck up Audacity in the future, but this pull request isn’t the thing to blow them up about.
(I really need to go make supper so I can’t finish all my thoughts re: the open source debate around “the code is open but managed by a single entity” vs. “the community sits at the decision-making table”… but Audacity has historically struggled at making important technical decisions on the Mac version due to lack of data and lack of strong leadership. Sounds from how Felix is talking that this may also be the case on other OSes too, but I haven’t paid as close attention to those. Telemetry addresses the lack of data, and the lack of community consultation on the issue does seem to indicate some heavy-handed approach to project management (lol) ok bye I’m starving)
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Telemetry is also a sore subject when there’s a vocal group of heavy users that are giving feedback but aren’t representative of anything like a plurality of users. It’s true on r/destinythegame and probably true here.
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there are fundamental assumptions underlying this discussion for me that i don’t know if all parties share.
felix said audacity is windows xp shit - he means the UI is jank as fuck, and it is, but the software is fantastic. what is the alternative? windows 10 shit? i mean, that’s the analogy’s implication
if this is good faith, won’t the maintainers just answer all of the (legitimate) questions people have about these actions?
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because it would take forever and go nowhere. speaking as someone who recently vocalized completely unjustified pride in running a pi-hole because, among other features, it makes it more difficult for the designers of games such as hades to overdesign their game, I am very happily confident that if everyone was like me the economy would crash and ideally no one should care
this is a genuinely fun article that seems relevant
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i think they should at least clearly outline why google/yandex are necessary. there are ways of collecting telemetry that don’t involve these companies! the devs have not given the reasons y’all have given in this thread - they would need to go ahead and do so - that’s a step toward good faith. there are concerns!
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I would rather justify myself to my mother than to a large group of Linux users
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Are you picturing an in-house system or some other, virtuous analytics collection vendor?
The fact is GA is standard and free with an asterisk. Any other system increases cost beyond the basic needs they laid out.
what are their requirements? that text was added today - after a vast amount of comments had already been posted. a few of which include alternatives.
it could all be fine! that’s where trust comes in. not from this specific PR. but the way it was handled, what it implements, what it represents for the future of the software
oh god now you’ve done it, the british columbian government is going to get involved somehow
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anyway i’m not qualified to stand in for any real substantive arguments. i mostly just wanted to give a small pushback against what sakurina said for my own sanity… then i guess i typed a lot
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the top blocked domain in our household is pardot’s own telemetry from my partner’s work lol
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I mean it feels like I’m missing context on how the Audacity community works because this feels pretty standard in terms of timing and communication in a PR. Since it’s gotten so much attention they’re likely having internal meetings to deal with the pushback and planning next steps and not updating the PR until they’ve discussed it and come up with viable options or conclusions.
This doesn’t read to me as a particularly big change in terms of code. If a PR isn’t the correct platform to introduce this change, what is?
i don’t have much more to add than what i wrote above
it feels weird to me that anyone would feel the need to even improve audacity, which is why introducing the telemetry is doubly weird
audacity is one of the few programs where it has a very narrow scope of things that it does well coupled with no real roadmap to make it “better” so I never really found myself wanting more out of audacity that I couldn’t find in another program
it kind of just feels like an attempt to get audacity to catch up to other DAWs but like, the opportunity to have done so is far far too late both on the open source AND free fronts so maybe I’m misreading the room but I actually just don’t get it
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imo “google analytics is, unfortunately, one of the better tools for this and as long as they’re only gathering diagnostic data & being open about what data is being gathered it can be used ethically” and “there’s a better process for introducing this to a community project than a sudden huge PR” can both be true
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