Open source friends are upset as the popular app gets new management. This would not be a problem if the new administrators did not add some features to the popular telemetry data collection application.
Let's see what happened:
Audacity is a free editor sound and recording, allowing any number of audio files to be mixed and edited. The program is written in C++ and uses the wxWidgets GUI toolkit to provide the same graphical interface on different operating systems.
The open source Audacity audio software was acquired by Muse Group, which introduced a new one team management which is responsible for the development and of course the new functions. A few days after the changeover, the new management decided to add some “essentials possibilities telemetry” in the software. The announcement was made this week on GitHub by Dmitry Vedenko, who, among others, Reported that they use Google Analytics to track the following:
- Start and end the session
- Errors, such as those of sqlite3, as we need to troubleshoot issues mentioned in the Audacity forum
- Use effects, sound generators, analysis tools so we can prioritize future improvements.
- Use file formats for import and export
- Operating system and Audacity versions
To identify sessions, users receive a UUID that is generated and stored on their computer. Developers also use Yandex Metrica to correctly estimate daily active users. The reason why a second service was used is not clear, but they report that Google Analytics has very limited ratios. Of course it is name the developer who announced the changes is Russian (Dmitry Vedenko), and maybe that's a reason choiceof the Russian Yandex.
Both services, however, record the IP from which the request originates.
According to the new management team, telemetry data collection is optional and configurable. The open source community, however, has not been thrilled with the news.
So if the new development team does not respect Audacity friends who have been using it for so many years, they will probably lose users, as the market has a lot of applications.
