For many, it was difficult to view this as anything but a hostile takeover of an established project by a group that didn’t even exist a week ago.Īs you might expect, the reality isn’t nearly so racy.
Not even a full day after users saw the first official word that the project had been absorbed by another group, unpopular changes were seemingly being rammed through the approval process without so much as a discussion period. Yet, that’s precisely what happened here. It should seem obvious that if you’re interested in a smooth transition of power and a happy community, the absolute last thing you should do is rush through massive changes that undermine a project’s core values within hours of taking ownership. Less than 24 hours after the official announcement of their acquisition had been posted to the Audacity site, the pull request to implement telemetry was opened.
It would still remain free software under the GPLv2, and beyond some admittedly much needed user interface tweaks, would be the same program that millions of users had been enjoying for over 20 years. But in his video, Keary made it clear that his intention wasn’t to strip the heart and soul out of Audacity. The pace at which things were moving was alarming to say the least. On May 3rd, an official announcement was posted to the Audacity site confirming the news that they had joined the Muse Group and that Keary would take over as the new project leader. Muse Group’s acquisition of Audacity was first acknowledged just four days later, in a YouTube video posted by Martin Keary (known online as Tantacrul) entitled “ I’m now in charge of Audacity. Despite the impressive catalog of software and communities that fall under their umbrella, representing hundreds of millions of users before Audacity is even factored into the equation, the Muse Group as an entity has only officially existed since April 26th (yes, that’s just eight days prior to the telemetry pull request). The organization is dedicated to developing and supporting audio tools and music software for content creators from all walks of life, and in addition to the Muse-branded packages such as MuseScore and MuseClass, they’re also responsible for Ultimate Guitar and Tonebridge. It’s impossible to talk about the proposed changes to Audacity without acknowledging the project’s new owner, Muse Group. Combined with the fact that the pull request was made just days after it was announced that Audacity was to be brought under new management, there was plenty of reason to sound the alarm.
Proposing such large and sweeping changes with no warning showed a troubling lack of transparency, and some of the decisions on how to implement this new telemetry system were downright concerning. Under normal circumstances, you could just chalk this one up to Raymond’s Bazaar at work.īut this time, things were a bit more complicated. You’d be hard pressed to find any large FOSS project that hasn’t been threatened with a fork or two when a subset of its users didn’t like the direction they felt things were moving in, and arguably, that’s exactly how the system is supposed to work. The situation may sound dire, but truth be told, it’s a common enough occurrence in the world of free and open source software (FOSS) development. If Audacity was going to start snooping on its users, they argued, then it was time to take the source and spin it off into a new project free of such monitoring. The accusations started flying, and it didn’t take long before the F-word started getting bandied around: fork. Sure enough, the comments for this particular pull request went south quickly. They hold privacy in high regard, and any talk of monitoring their activity is always going to be met with strong resistance. Now, the sort of folks who believe that software should be free as in speech tend to be a prickly bunch. Millions, tens of millions? Nobody really knows how many people are using this particular tool and on what platforms, so it’s not hard to see why a pull request was recently proposed which would bake analytics into the software in an effort to start answering some of these core questions. The GPLv2 licensed multi-platform audio editor has been providing a powerful and easy to use set of tools for amateurs and professionals alike since 1999, and is used daily by…well, it’s hard to say. But maintaining a large open source project and keeping its community happy while continuing to evolve and stay on the cutting edge is another story entirely. Extra points awarded if you came up with a clever logo and remembered to actually document what the project is supposed to do. Starting an open source project is easy: write some code, pick a compatible license, and push it up to GitHub.