Audacity has been "bought" by Muse a few days ago:

https://librearts.org/2021/05/ultimate-guitar-launches-muse-group-and-acquires-audacity/

It's free software, so they probably just bought the name. I don't
really see why anyone would want to do that, but I'm not a lawyer nor an
economist.

Anyway, it didn't take long until this happened:

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

They immediately wanted to add "telemetry" to the program. One way to
look at it: They want to better understand how their shiny new program
is being used.

As you can see from the number of comments on GitHub, it caused quite a
bit of backlash. There are a few interesting points:

1.  They made telemetry optional. You have to opt-in in order to send
    your usage data to your server. Nice, isn't it? It's also a great
    way to silence people who oppose the feature. "Hey, why are you
    concerned, you have to opt-in!" Really? Who guarantees that you
    don't change the default? Who guarantees that telemetry won't be
    activated *by accident*? As soon as this feature exists, all trust
    is lost. And now you'll probably call me paranoid, hm?
2.  If telemetry is optional, then it's useless, as this comment will
    explain:
    https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835#issuecomment-835159591
3.  The more programs add telemetry, the worse it gets. You can compare
    it to those totally pointless "cookie banners" that GDPR has
    created. This comment elaborates:
    https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835#issuecomment-835140299

I don't know how to address the broader issue here, which is: How do you
deal with a "shitstorm" like this? The big question is, is it just a
tiny fraction of users who are now speaking up? Or is it really a big
issue?

The next PR is also interesting:

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/836

And there's a comment that really makes me angry. I quote:

> if you really want nothing to do with google, you might as well stop
> using the web. upcoming quic/http3 is basically a google creation, so
> the web will be served on a protocol engineered at google.

This is the wrong way to look at the world. "Google already runs so much
stuff, meh, you can't do anything about it. So, why don't we just
actively contribute to the problem and start using MORE of their stuff?"

Some guy recently told me in private: "Ugh, yeah, companies like Google
suck. They're evil. I know that. But I choose to ignore it, because I
might go crazy otherwise. So, hey, look, that Google product over there,
isn't it nice? Let's use it!"

What the hell, mate.