Late Stage Capitalism

00:00:00 In this section, the speaker discusses the controversial changes that occurred after Audacity was acquired by Muse Group. These changes included the introduction of Telemetry, which raised concerns among the free and open-source software community. However, the speaker reassures viewers that the current privacy policy only includes minimal Telemetry such as update checking and error reporting, which can be easily disabled. Additionally, Audacity no longer sends data to Google and Yandex for analytics and has removed the clause about sharing data with law enforcement. Overall, the speaker concludes that there is no need to worry about Audacity being spyware and that the software is safe to use. 00:05:00 In this section, it is mentioned that the pushback from the community against the planned changes for Audacity has had an effect, with certain changes, such as telemetry, being scrapped. However, one concern that remains is the Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which requires anyone contributing code to Audacity to sign a legal document. While the Muse Group, the new owner of Audacity, has stated that it will keep Audacity free and open source, the CLA gives them the power to potentially repackage the code as a proprietary application in the future. Despite this, for end users, there may not be much cause for worry. The section also highlights some improvements made to Audacity since the acquisition, including the ability to drag elements with the mouse, non-destructive editing, support for VST3 plugins, and a few interface changes. Additionally, while there have been several forks of Audacity, most of them are no longer active, with Tenacity being one of the few that is still actively updated. 00:10:00 In this section, the speaker discusses the current state of Audacity and its forks, specifically Tenacity. Tenacity has had a turbulent development history, with the original maintainer stepping down due to receiving death threats. The previous maintainer of Sawstacity is now in charge of Tenacity, which is considered to be the most prominent fork. However, Tenacity is still in beta and may contain bugs and possible data loss, so the speaker does not recommend using it full-time. Additionally, Tenacity is lacking some of the new features that have been added to Audacity. In conclusion, the speaker suggests sticking with Audacity as it is currently in good hands and is a reliable choice for audio editing