You're right. Neither of these things are proof of honesty but to be clear, I would never work on a project that collects or misuses user data. This isn’t really a matter of “taking my word for it,” either. If anything like that were happening, it would be visible in the codebase, which anyone can look through (and many have). The app simply can’t transmit data without explicit instructions in the code.
Audacity does not store any personal information of any kind, and never did.
It's not quite that simple. While the codebase is open source, the website could provide binaries that were not built from the open source code (e.g by patching to add tracking). So it is necessary to trust Muse Group if you're installing from the recommended source (which the vast majority of users will be doing).
Even if there is no tracking at the moment, there is always the worry that Muse Group will "go bad" and start adding tracking, or make the later versions closed-source, etc. One could argue that it's still better than a fully closed source company - sure - but what happens to Audacity/MuseScore then?
Reliance on a single company developing code has huge benefits: as discussed in this video, the centralisation really helped with vision and planning; but it does make me slightly uncomfortable. The development is no longer "open", in the sense of community driven. The application now has a different goal (to make money for Muse Group), not necessarily aligned with what users want/need. It cuts to the core of what we actually want from free software - lack of profit motive? transparency? Of what exactly?
It cuts to the core of what we actually want from free software
Mostly people want free as in beer and actual users of Audacity use Audacity because they want to process audio.
it does make me slightly uncomfortable
Then you have a choice to make. There are many other audio software packages with a variety of tradeoffs to choose from because everything is not for everyone.
make money for Muse Group
To me the strategy appears to be that strengthening the two open source projects (MuseScore and Audacity) enhances their many commercial offerings…for example a stronger MuseScore is better for Hal Leonard Publishing particularly in light of the demise of Finale and a better Audacity code base is a good way to develop the audio code that other Muse Group products need anyway.
And for what my pure speculation is worth, the purchase of the trademarks for Audacity and MuseScore could rationally contain conditions underwhich Muse Group would have to sell those trademarks back to the original owners.
But even absent such conditions of sale, the original trademark owners likely trusted Muse Group to do the right thing (and if the sale was just about money, then the original trademark owners were already mercenary themselves and so whatever trust you previously had was already misplaced).
While the codebase is open source, the website could provide binaries that were not built from the open source code (e.g by patching to add tracking).
yeah I think audacity just got dinged by its association with musescore, but its probably a good idea to watch out who you associate with. I like audacity but I try to stick with the earliest version that still runs, my current version is like 5 years old or something and it does what I need.
He's probably aware of all the issues then, it'd thus be ok to just hide my comment, I don't mind. I will say that everytime I read about the musescore/audacity/guitar-whatever-it-is stuff it makes me want to find an earlier version of audacity, I might run out of versions at some point haha
We're using the framework my team on MuseScore Studio created for the UI in Audacity. This allows us to port over the significant amount of screen reader support we built over there too.
We'll need to spend time making sure it's applying correctly to every corner of the app - but when it's done, the app will be far more broadly supported than V3.
I have had absolutely nothing to do with the design of MuseScore.com.
I was hired to work on the open source notation app, which is free - meaning users can't subscribe to anything, so it isn't possible for me to have instituted anything like these patterns.
We also never put anything in Audacity to 'spy' on users. That's verifiably untrue because the app is open source and anyone can check the code to verify it. The actual thing people were irritated by was our attempt to include opt-in telemetry, which is a pretty significantly different thing to spyware. Users rebelled against the idea, so we didn't include it.
MuseScore desktop (the composition / notation app) has never been behind a paywall. This is a mixup with the mobile application which is a sheet music viewer that features copyrighted scores.
It's true that there often exists a clash between designers and those who champion accessibility standards. IMO, this is normally because the designer in question hasn't enough experience working on software. Speaking for myself? I designed the accessibility features in Paint 3D while at Microsoft. I was in charge of accessibility of another Microsoft Studio that worked on Hololens software.
For MuseScore 4 (currently in development), I have made sure that every bit of UI passes web accessibility contrast standards and I have designed a new 'High Contrast Mode' which is being implemented right now. In addition, myself and another member of the UKAAF (Peter Jonas) have designed a far better focus state / keyboard navigation system into MS4 than MS3 had. This will enable much better screen reader support and will also help with ongoing efforts to introduce Braille support too.
I'm not one of those designers. But I do sympathise with the concern. I see it all the time!
You mention in the video that the next steps will involve interviewing users and developers to find out more about the software usability and potential issues / fixes. Could you make this whole process and the results public, such that other OSS can benefit from this kind of usability analysis?
There are indeed many resources out there about this sort of process, but I think it would be great to see an expert long-form explaining how they take the interview results and convert them into actionable goals in order to improve the user experience.
I'd add to this the thought of supporting a dumping-ground approach where people can throw suggestions, rants, complaints etc "over the wall" into a giant wiki/knowledgebase or bug tracker type environment that accepts OC submissions or just links to external discussions or sources of insight.
Hmm. Now I'm wondering whether such a thing should be run for a finite period, or left open to track improvement over time. Perhaps the system could be cyclic, with "calls for feedback" that would require re-submission into each cycle. This would have the advantage of effectively auto-closing all unfinished work after feedback invitations, but the disadvantage of frustrating repeat submitters of issues that generally don't get prioritized. ...You know what, there are probably good established ways of doing this, Microsoft probably knows this stuff backwards, and the Blender foundation seem to have a good feedback thing going so they probably know a thing or two as well.
Regardless of how it's done, spreading the fact that it is being done far and wide is IMO crucial (eg, getting this onto as many OSS/tech news sites as possible) - and I also think that the _worse_ the signal/noise ratio, the better, as I reckon this would be a good indicator that the long tail of the interesting really-edge cases are effectively being captured!
I just started using MuseScore 3.6 and I've gotta say it is surprisingly usable for an open source project. There are some annoyances, like drag-and-drop scrolling the page instead of selecting notes, but overall it becomes intuitive quite quickly. So, if that is your work, then congratulations so far! Looking forward to version 4.
Audacity does not store any personal information of any kind, and never did.