Notably, the previous maintainer of this fork stepped down a couple of days ago, after a harassment campaign from 4chan allegedly escalated to a violent attack.
After alleged harassment campaign. What we know for sure is the following – the former maintainer ran poll for github's users opinion on the project name, added «sneedacity» as valid choice, and then... declared the poll results invalid blaming foreign influence for the winner as well as for subsequent criticism.
Even up-to-date The Register article states: 'a search of the forum shows no evidence of cookiengineer's address details being shared nor calls for physical violence'.
How comes what there is a proof of genuine Jenna Jameson visit to /b/ while absolutely no evidence to back up the claims for very recent event?
> I'm having trouble seeing the negative consequences here.
Well... being easily manipulated into believing the hoax and taking a side in silly fork war. And implicitly approving what rigged poll is just fine for community.
I don't want to condemn anyone nor to clear anyone, but your analysis is binary and misses two important cases ③ maintainer didn't lie, just exaggerated things a bit, ④ exploiting public fears about 4chan.
As someone who spent too much time on 4chan a long time ago, public fears are mostly accurate.
The maintainer filed a police report for what it's worth, so any evidence beyond what's been provided and which is already more than enough will come out in court and not before.
Alleged? Hahahah. 4chan has been doxxing people for more than a decade. If you think it's weird to spam a poll and send threats, you need to see some of their history. There's still threads on 4chan insulting cookie.
> "I really thought long about this, and I haven't slept in two days due to ongoing harassments of 4chan," cookiengineer claimed in a post to the Tenacity GitHub Issues page some 13 hours ago. "As the first people were literally arriving at my place of living, where they knocked on my doors and windows to scare us, I am hereby officially stepping down as a maintainer of this project.
> "The safety of my family is worth more than an open source project. They found out my address via a YouTube video where someone was posting my nickname combined with my real legal name (which meanwhile got taken down due to my asking). The incident happened shortly 23:00 CEST [21:00 UTC], today; and the police took over this case."
And people call me "paranoid" when I go to inconvenient-but-practicible lengths to keep my dox off the internet.
> And people call me "paranoid" when I go to inconvenient-but-practicible lengths to keep my dox off the internet.
I've long since lost count of how many times I've been ridiculed as "paranoid" by the clueless over various absolutely basic and obvious security practices. If choosing to be wise and safe is "paranoid", then count me in. I'd rather be "paranoid" in the eyes of people who actively fight tooth and nail to stay ignorant about online/network security than fall victim to one of the many consequences of not choosing safety over convenience and ignorance.
Holy jeebus fuck!! People need to find another hobby.
I am not discounting the effects of the harrasment. Shit online is one thing, but once they start coming to people's place of living is an entirely different thing altogether. That's beyond ridiculous, and I really hope the police take this seriously. I'm going through similiar/different home harrasment issues, and I can definitely sympathize.
Doing this shit because someone with a software package does something you don't agree with? Really sounds like mental problems to me, as that's the only thing I can think of. Rational people don't do that.
There is no doxx going on in /g/, you'll get banned for it.
Instead people embed links in images and posts right before threads necro to discord servers etc... And people who have too much time on their hands that frequent for example /g/ organize the doxx there.
I've reported and got enough of those taken down to say that it's very probable they actually did doxx.
Beyond that it they've filed a police report that instantly makes it quite credible.
Also I don't see why someone who doesn't use C professionally isn't allowed to fork it. Forking a project is more about building a community behind the fork than anything else.
this is the first I've heard of it, and I've spent some time on 4chan. Frankly I'm skeptical. 4chan already blocks you from uploading images that have extra data embedded in them.
EDIT:
To add to this, how 4chan actually doxes people is very different. They typically post one very large image, which is a detailed collage of images with bits of information relating to the subject they are trying to identify. This is so the image can be easily downloaded and reposted. They did this a lot to help with identifying Antifa vandals a year ago.
You’re seriously trying to justify ANY harassment by saying they took a poll of popular names and then chose one the 4chan trolls didn’t like? Who cares if they chose the least popular name? That’s their choice. Grow up, you don’t always get your way, that’s part of life.
It's not an oversimplification - it doesn't matter what the project did before. People always have the option not to use it. Harassing people because they don't run the project as you want cannot be excused.
Every single time 4chan or one of its offspring cause real-world damage, the first thing its users will say is always "there is no evidence". Every single time. Happened when KiwiFarms drove an innocent person to suicide a few weeks back as well.
It is cowardly and disgusting, and I do not want to hear it ever again.
Your trustworthiness is through the absolute floor already and I am really not believing a single word you say. You are part of a massively toxic group and making excuses for it.
That’s like when they said GamerGate was about journalistic ethics: a transparent lie to elicit sympathy. It doesn’t even make sense: what would that mean in this context? It’s not like they forked it because they were concerned about accessibility.
As you can tell from the cartoon and organization name, it’s a 4chan meme based on a Simpsons episode:
The sneedacity fork came as a response to not accepting the name in the poll in the tenacity fork, did it not?
Covering up what was originally a more objectionable suggestion with indicators later that it was more benign is what I would consider SOP for something like this. That doesn't mean it is the more alleged meaning, but I wouldn't take anything from the sneedacity fork as an indicator it isn't/wasn't for that reason.
Note that 4chan is usually archived by third-parties, if you want to look at what's said on it, try https://desuarchive.org/g/. Some posts appear to have been deleted (the ones with cookieengineer personal information for example). Standard disclaimer that this is just a tip for information and not a statement endorsing anything about this whole affair.
I read that, which is why I asked the question. None of those concerns make the original Audacity not "FLOSS".
Telemetry (which was opt-in and not merged), crash reporting, etc. do not make software non-free. CLAs do not violate the GPL -- the FSF uses a CLA for GNU projects. So neither of these make Audacity non-FLOSS.
The privacy policy language is not binding and does not override the GPL. I think including it was a mistake and that it should be removed, solving the problem. Plenty of proprietary software (Windows, etc.) has crash reporting and telemetry and doesn't have a blanket "no kids allowed" policy, and Microsoft has better lawyers than Muse Group.
It would certainly be a good idea for Audacity to, by policy, enforce that any kind of crash reporting, auto-updating, analytics, etc. is opt-in. Perhaps the existence of a fork will push them to do this.
"Telemetry (which was opt-in and not merged), crash reporting, etc. do not make software non-free."
Collecting "telemetry" on minors, specifically under 13, without the minors' parents permission is illegal. In order to collect telemetry, they have to restrict the application's use to those over 13 (added to their privacy policy, for some reason, but I suspect that would not be satisfactory), which violates the "no restrictions on use" clause from the GPL.
>which violates the "no restrictions on use" clause from the GPL
This seems to be a bad interpretation. This is not adding restrictions on use, this is complying with other legal restrictions that are already there. If that were true, you wouldn't be able to have things like chat clients be GPL, because the same restrictions would apply there with allowing chat servers to collect data.
The GPL and the FSF legal eagles have a long history of replying, "Then you can't have things like that. Sorry."
I suspect there would also be an argument that an intentional distributed system like a chat client/server would be a different beast from an application like an audio editor.
COPPA restrictions only "appl[y] to an operator of a general audience website if it has actual knowledge that a particular visitor is a child"[1]. As for GDPR, crash reports and auto-updating seem likely to fall under "legitimate interests", which means that the requirements for parental consent would not apply.
Any interpretation of GDPR expansive enough to prohibit children from using software containing an auto-updater would also certainly prohibit them from sending an email or browsing most websites.
That's how I read it. Since Audacity is FOSS, I'm inferring that the developers believe that Audacity's new telemetry capabilities conflict with the "L" = "free as in freedom" bit of FLOSS.
This is the third time this fork has shown up on HackerNews in as many days, and all I've seen from this new group is bikeshedding and drama.
They are more focused on picking a name, logo and who is in charge than they are on pushing releases. By comparison, Sneedcity is already making changes and pushing releases out.
IMO this is a group that is more interested in "owning" a popular open-source project than they are maintaining an open-source project. Someone saw the Audacity drama as an opportunity to pad their resume by "running" an open-source project.
As ESR pointed out forks live and die by the legitimacy of the broader community, and so far I haven't seen anything from these team that suggests they are legitimate.
https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/99