- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
TL;DR this is a huge overhaul of the popular open-source audio editing app. The UI specifically has been the biggest overhaul, making it a lot more modern and friendly to use.
Hopefully, one day, GIMP will get some kind of update like this.
It wasn’t about “shoddy tech reporting”. Why would a FOSS audio editing app need to know your country, any personal “Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)”, share it with a wide network of people and potential buyers, as well as their “main office in Russia”? There should be no telemetry of any sort. Any logs kept should be strictly local, which would allow users to send them to the support team voluntarily.
It was to support the auto-update mechanism IIRC. It has to reach out to a server to do that, and the rest of the terms are just legal CYA for what could be possible based on that.
Why would I want an auto-update mechanism in the software? That’s what my distro’s package manager is for. And it doesn’t care who I am or where I’m from. Nor has any other software I’ve encountered with such a useless-to-Linux-users mechanism demanded any information about me.
In short, that rationale is obvious nonsense. That may be why they claim they’re doing it, but it doesn’t hold up.
I don’t see how an auto-update feature would need any of those things either. The request is made by the remote user to the Audacity update server. Of course, Linux servers typically keep logs, but that would be one line saying that in order for the app to check for updates or to be updated, an IP address and connection timestamp may end up on the update server.