Audacity goes to shit - 4chan wins the fork race

[ill88eagle]

I will try not to make this a long read.

Audacity was recently acquired by MUSE group and announced they were gonna add google+yandex telemetry to a fucking audio editor. Needless to say the free software and open source community went ballistic. So they backed down and promised to not do anything to piss off the community again. everything seemed fine and then they published a new privacy policy. Salient sniplets of said policy: Lol we are gonna do the telemetry anyway and we will share your personal data with law enforcement when asked- oh and hey, you now have to be 13 to be allowed to use audacity.

And that was it, the community wouldn't have it. New forks sprung up pretty fast and what had a lot of hype cause the maintainer [cookiengineer, or cookie for short] was going all: Democracy YAY! He did a multiple choice poll on the title of the new fork and one of the options was "sneedacity". This was 3-4 days ago.

if you a not familiar with the sneed meme watch this harmless video and pay attention to the signboard in the beginning

if you a not familiar with the sneed meme watch this harmless video and pay attention to the signboard in the beginning

The /g/entoo-men of 4chan got a whiff of it since "what do we use instead of audacity now?" was being discussed extensively on the /g/ board, and made a run on cookie's poll thus voting Sneedacity to the top. Cookie didn't like that, shut down the poll and made a new one. Without any sneed in it. That prompted a lot of github users to question his democratic intentions and certainly caused a grudge in the /g/ community. Seeing those reactions on his poll he started deleting comments. This is where I wont go into details (unless you ask nicely), but he had a meltdown and stepped down accusing the hacker known as 4chan of raiding his project, harrassing him by phone and physically threatening him by showing up at his house with a knife. I shit you not.

In the meantime the /g/entoomen regrouped and made their own Sneedacity fork which is now functional with no telemetry and available as mac, windows and linux binaries + addapted by a few linux repos (more will follow troup once code has been audited and packaged) ---> https://sneedacity.org/

[RobertX]

It's a strange thing that people use other's code to rebel against an idea that wasn't liked by that very person whose code you made a fork of.

Other than that, I have no problems using a version of a program that is still relevant but without the spyware.

Long live Sneedacity!

[ill88eagle]

It's a strange thing that people use other's code to rebel against an idea that wasn't liked by that very person whose code you made a fork of.

Maybe it's because I have been up all night but I have no idea what exactly you are trying to say here...???

I followed the drama closely over the last 4 days on both github, hackernews and 4chan (with the occasional cookie tweets and whatnot). When cookie blew up, arguably there were a lot of channers trolling his github, but there was zero doxxing or epic hacker wars being plotted or executed from the threads on /g/. Rather a handful of resourceful people went ahead and created their own fork. They since got banned from github following cookies allegations, but since the repo they created is 100% open (as opposed to cookies top-down with a nice face thing), it is still being developed actively by volunteering /g/entoomen: https://github.com/Sneeds-Feed-and-Seed/sneedacity

The ones who are serious about it removed the botnet, changed some icons+naming, made sure it would compile and run on all the big 3 OSs, and are now going about upgrading the GPL from v2 to v3 + maybe AGPL. All in order to keep it 100% free as in freedom and USER CONTROLLED as in RMS's dreams.

You can say what you like about the sneed meme... it is now being claimed to be a slur (cookie's idea) in woke circles. Me I kinda like the idea of "weeelll look at that city slicker pulling up with his fancy macbook" etc...

Also (outdated as there are now installable binaries- no need for manual compile/build):

[RobertX]

Sorry. I was saying that I find it strange that you would copy someone's idea to make a "better" version.

It's like when a disgruntled Microsoft user uses the Windows code to make a better version of the OS, with his code.

I'm sure Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer will be mad, but at the same time would be pleased that at least their stuff are made relevant since a part of their 'property' is still used

If you were Gates/Ballmer, would you be pleased?

EDIT: What I'm trying to say in conclusion is open source software is a tricky subject. I don't understand it, but I don't mind it either.

[ill88eagle]

Stallman's GPL ensures that any code published under that license remains GPL (Free as in freedom) 4EVA. And that means everybody can fork it and make their own (among other things).

Audacity was GPL v2 from the start. Made by some university people who needed a free audio tool for science and education. They chose GPL for a reason.

Muse group acquiring it didn't change that. Muse adding telemetry to the original code (that they didn't make- they just bought the audacity trademark) was not in direct conflict with the GPL, but bad enough for freetards united to yell foul loud enough for Muse say whoopsie we totally didn't mean that. Their later privacy policies however I would argue are indeed breaking the GPL rules (specifically the no children allowed part).

And don't get me started on Bill Gates. When RMS published his gnu manifesto and GPL license, Gates infuriated wrote a 3 paged public letter condemming the practice of free software as stealing (let's pretend he didn't steal the windows UI from xerox while working there).

[RobertX]

I know, I support open source, it's just that there are still elements I don't quite grasp.

It's kind of like a permitted form of plagiarism. Like I said, while making no attempt to say it's plagiarism, and that I have no problem with it, it's still a very intangible concept. Probably because I'm stupid.

I thought Gates stole the UI from Macintosh. Can you enlighten me on the subject?

EDIT: Of course the who-did-it-first argument is kind of a silly one. It's who-does-it-better that's more relevant.

[ill88eagle]

I know, I support open source, it's just that there are still elements I don't quite grasp.

It's kind of like a permitted form of plagiarism. Like I said, while making no attempt to say it's plagiarism, and that I have no problem with it, it's still a very intangible concept. Probably because I'm stupid.

I thought Gates stole the UI from Macintosh. Can you enlighten me on the subject?

EDIT: Of course the who-did-it-first argument is kind of a silly one. It's who-does-it-better that's more relevant.

If I recall correctly, Gates was working for apple collecting what he could about xerox fantastic graphic interface and mouse and such for Jobs to use, and then used it himself as well- double agent style. Jobs got pissed off about it and Gates told him something along the lines of "I didn't steal from you. You hired me to steal from xerox"

Either way they are both THIEVES!

[RobertX]

And you are a weirdo! Kidding.

In all seriousness, they got away with this?

Oh, stupid question, of course they did.

[RobertX]

Question: did the original Bit Torrent also suffer the same fate?

[ill88eagle]

Question: did the original Bit Torrent also suffer the same fate?

Are you talking about a piece of software or the protocol?