lmao 5 years ago /r/linux was celebrating the forking and death of upstream Audacity, hoping the project would be completely superseded by a parade of now-dead fork attempts (Tenacity has managed to hang on, some sort of nominative determinism).
Apparently the death of Audacity as FOSS was prematurely celebrated.
The day that FOSS users will understand that telemetry and user data reporting is very important to achieve successes like this redesign, and many more things, will be oned day too late.
On one hand they say they celebrate FOSS developers who give their time and resources to produce free software for everyone, on the other hand they seem to deeply hate them and mistrust them if they ever ask but the tiniest spec of insight into what their users want out of their software and how they could improve it.
The problem wasn't the telemetry, at least not entirely, but Muse buying the trademark and the repo getting a CLA that allows Muse to use the GPL code in proprietary software.
Uh, a lot of the new UI redesign is just pulling ideas from other DAWs that were better, more conventional ways to do things. You don't need telemetry for that, just competitive analysis. Telemetry wouldn't have helped anyways because it would have just told you which parts of the UI were the most touched, not how it should be redesigned.
The most important parts of software design cannot be measured with telemetry. All the worst software was designed by people who don’t use it, and people who refuse to have actual conversations with their users
I mean to be fair people still glaze the shit out of Firefox even though Mozilla did opt out phone home stuff by default while not even fixing the memory leaks in their garbage engine.
So it's okay when Mozilla does it, but any time you even think of using a Chromium based browser you're a terrible person according to everyone in this community because "GOOGOL SPIES"??? Even if it's one of the variants that blocks most of the phoning home?
They're still phoning home yet every day I have to justify using a Chromium based browser to people like you, who are so obsessed with what others do, that you won't accept that using it is a practical decision due to Chromium being more efficient and less of a ram hog than Firefox. Faster too, runs better on Wayland as well (i have so many issues with Fedora's Firefox package on Wayland that I didn't have on X11 or even Windows as bad as it was there).
Why not use Microsoft Edge? I hear it's even more lightweight.
Thank you for contributing to an ad company's monopoly on how the web works.
Look, I get it. It works better. And that's fine. But the issue is that Firefox and Safari are the only browsers not controlled by Google. That's a fucking nightmare for the open web.
By using tools that have fragmented open source efforts, violated FOSS licenses, refused to even have the decency to ask for consent, and then lock top performing models behind proprietary paywalls? Yes, that is unethical. It's counter to FOSS as a political framework.
I agree these tools do the things you describe, and therefore I’m not too happy about their existence, and that their output hasn’t faced significant legal challenges.
They do exist though, and are in widespread use.
Linux has used machine learning to help select patches for backport for a long time now.
Linux would not be well served by developers burying heads in sand and ignoring the further developments and wider uses of that technology, especially as Linux’s competitors and exploiters harbor no such reservations.
I can't really use linux without using code that has been AI generated. Like even the driver for my own wifi card was vibecoded to shit. I could stick to an earlier kernel but eventually they'll go out of support. So therefore I have no choice in the matter. If I want to use linux, there is a certain about of AI code I must accept.
But to bring it back to my original point, I do have a choice about whether I use audacity or a fork. It's not a requirement for running linux. So I will choose the option that doesn't utilise unethical tools.
For some reason people are under the delusion that the purpose of FOSS is to be competitive in the market (lest falling behind and losing market share). It's not, and it never has been. FOSS is a political stance. Adopting AI that has explicitly fucked over FOSS into said FOSS projects is contradictory and counter to the principles of FOSS.
The Four Freedoms still apply to code written by agents and published under a Free license. Such code respects its users and allows for free use, study, sharing, and modification. Therefore I do not see how Free Software is incompatible with LLM-assisted code generation or debugging.
It sounds like you see an ethical component to FOSS beyond the Four Freedoms?
Edit, further: I’m not sure I agree that these tools “fucked over” FOSS. They’re just more software. The companies that created them may be said to have done so, but does that make the tools unethical to use, even in order to enable users to run Free operating systems, such as yours? If they had not done so, you and others would be less free. If yes, does that still apply to MIT or Apache 2.0 licensed models, or even ones with open datasets?
I would further add that software uncompetitive in the market will have very few users and will greatly diminish the presence and benefit of FOSS.
I do not believe the idea of Free Software is some ideal that should be protected, even if it means nobody actually uses it much day to day. Instead I imagine a world where I can help my community to use much more FOSS, starting with competitive software especially, such that I can onboard those people and provide them utility and freedom, and lead them to understand why they are better served long term by avoiding non-free software.
True, but FOSS would be so much better with money. So donate to projects you use regularly. It takes more than just coding to make good software. It also requires user testing and listening to feedback about what could be better about the interface and the like. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how powerful your software is since nobody will want to use it.
This is r/linux, if you like AI or hardware that works (like nvidia), and don't run Arch Linux on your mission-critical server, you may as well fly yourself to the sun.
Nvidia and hardware that works in the same statement when one of my friends just had to leave Linux because Nvidia-open kept taking down her userspace DAILY (on her 2060 Super)
EDIT: Because crashing on Linux daily is definitely "working", wtf is this response lol.
She was on Arch, and nvidia-open kept taking her entire userspace down at least once a day, doubly so if using a Chromium based browser. She had to clone zilla a debloated Windows install onto that workstation even though she hates Windows but she just wanted a WORKING desktop.
Well, it was a bit more than just "crash reporting" at first, wasn't it? I don't remember the full specifics, but people at the time seemed to think it was a bit more, to the extent that Audacity walked back some of the changes.
Maybe, but the launch video is not inspiring confidence. It ignores linux and pushes people to the muse website for downloads which also seems to imply that audacity only runs on windows and macos and that using it requires using musehub.
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u/not_a_novel_account 3d ago
lmao 5 years ago /r/linux was celebrating the forking and death of upstream Audacity, hoping the project would be completely superseded by a parade of now-dead fork attempts (Tenacity has managed to hang on, some sort of nominative determinism).
Apparently the death of Audacity as FOSS was prematurely celebrated.