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Comment by SirensOfTitan | Hacker News Reader

I find this trend against reasonable telemetry in OSS ridiculous and naively idealistic. I could also divine that perhaps 90%+ of Audacity users use a closed source application that uses invasive telemetry.

The way the free software community treats its own is reminiscent of progressives in America: constantly eating your own kind while letting your opponents flourish.

There’s a reasonable amount of telemetry, and without it the free, OSS side can’t compete with closed source products on a level playing field.

I’ll even go further and suggest that light telemetry should be on (and able to be disabled) by default.

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Here is the repository for the Microsoft calculator:

https://github.com/microsoft/calculator

An application universally ridiculed for it's inclusion of in-depth telemetry. It's time to challenge your preconceptions: find the roadmap items, features or bugs informed by the gathering of the telemetry data.

Here is what's really happening:

* Migrating the codebase to C#

* Iterating upon the existing app design based on the latest guidelines for Fluent Design and WinUI

That last one is probably going to be obsolete by the time they are finished. What's the value here that telemetry is delivering?

This is the story all over the industry. Fancy dashboards everywhere, but the people shaping products haven't made an evidence-based decision in years.

You just mentioned 2 pinned issues out of 203 open ones and 558 closed ones.

Of course it has, it's the calculator on GitHub. It also has a docs/roadmap.md. Thanks for playing.

If "reasonable telemetry" comes with the requirement to add only 13+ age requirement to your offline desktop sound editor, then it's not reasonable.

Part of the outrage stems from the fact that these changes were dropped on the community with little warning or discussion, I think

And part of it stems from the idea that a local application working on a local machine against local data ought to be forbidden to children. If there is anything at all about the telemetry that even raises a question about COPPA under those circumstances, you're doing it wrong.

If the telemetry was even opt-out at run time, the fork would never have happened.

But it is. The only network communication that isn't opt-in is the update checker, and that has an opt-out.

Other people doing bad things isn't a justification or excuse to do bad things even if they are slightly less bad.

More people are worried that the new TOS conflicts with the code license, which seems like fair criticism (why does it need to enforce a minimum age? why are we withholding information for law enforcement?). Had they approached this from a more transparent/secure perspective it would have been a lot more understandable, but Open Source has always been about voluntary contribution, which is how it sustains an otherwise suicidal business model. Until recently, there was no incentive to add telemetry, but Audacity has recently undergone a bit of a takeover (maybe "change in management" is more apt), which gives plenty of people reason for concern. I'm certainly going to be sticking to the forks on my machine, but it's ultimately up to the users, and to a greater degree, the volunteers.

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