Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment by 4chan losers who took issue with 'Tenacity' name
Efforts to wrest control of the open-source Audacity audio editing project from corporate owner Muse Group have hit a stumbling block after the maintainer of one of the more popular forks stepped down over alleged physical harassment.
The trouble began when the two-decade-old Audacity project was acquired by Muse Group in May, a freshly launched parent company holding commercial services Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, and others. Audacity seemed like a natural enough fit, and new maintainer Martin "Tantacrul" Keary promised it would remain both free and open source.
Days later, the company added telemetry to the software, which uploaded unspecified metrics to third-party servers including Google in the US and Yandex in Russia. The fact the telemetry was optional did little to pacify critics, and it was was quickly reversed. Then came a change to the privacy agreement, which included an attempt to prevent under-13s from using the software – on the face of it an apparent breach of the GNU General Public Licence 2 under which the software is published.
The responses to these moves was entirely predictable: the project was forked, multiple times, taking the source code from either before the telemetry was introduced or after it was removed and spinning it into a new project under a different name – outside Muse Group's control.
