Where I think audacity dropped the ball on is on communication. If it's framed the right way, most people will understand that resources are limited and that you'll get a better overall experience if developers can focus their time on things that really matter. If no one is using a 32-bit system, say, then you can stop allocating resources to testing and maintaining a 32-bit executable. Those resources can then be used for something productive that delivers actual value. IIRC (this was many years ago), you were also able to opt out.
I used to work on an open source tool, and we would also collect similar information. This was a Visual Studio extension, and one of the data points we collected was the VS version that the user was running. Resources were limited; we were 2-3 people for much of the time I was there, and there was 1 full time dev assigned to the project. Knowing that nobody was using Visual Studio 2010 any more meant that we didn't need to test the extension in that version of VS and could concentrate on adding features that would only work with more recent versions.
Otherwise you could end up spending 40 person hours on fixing an issue that no user will ever experience (i.e. exclusive to old versions of VS that nobody is using any more), or hold back adding improvements requested by users because they will only work in the most recent versions of VS.
For the most part, the whole brouhaha about audacity is spyware was really just a lot of misinformed youtubers and people on forums that didn't really understand things like the fact that it is impossible to go online without sharing your IP. That's just how the internet works. You can't order something off Amazon and then get in a tizzy because they've asked you for a delivery address ("But that's personal information! You'd know where I live!"). You can't request web content and then expect to receive it without the other end knowing where to send said data.
I used to work on an open source tool, and we would also collect similar information. This was a Visual Studio extension, and one of the data points we collected was the VS version that the user was running. Resources were limited; we were 2-3 people for much of the time I was there, and there was 1 full time dev assigned to the project. Knowing that nobody was using Visual Studio 2010 any more meant that we didn't need to test the extension in that version of VS and could concentrate on adding features that would only work with more recent versions.
Otherwise you could end up spending 40 person hours on fixing an issue that no user will ever experience (i.e. exclusive to old versions of VS that nobody is using any more), or hold back adding improvements requested by users because they will only work in the most recent versions of VS.
For the most part, the whole brouhaha about audacity is spyware was really just a lot of misinformed youtubers and people on forums that didn't really understand things like the fact that it is impossible to go online without sharing your IP. That's just how the internet works. You can't order something off Amazon and then get in a tizzy because they've asked you for a delivery address ("But that's personal information! You'd know where I live!"). You can't request web content and then expect to receive it without the other end knowing where to send said data.
Statistics: Posted by sjm — Fri Mar 29, 2024 1:02 pm