Hackaday Newsletter 0x17

Switching open source software is (mostly) painless [HACKADAY]( Black Starts: How the Grid Gets Restarted [Read Article Now»]( Open Source is Choice By [Elliot Williams]( If you haven't been following along with the licensing kerfuffle surrounding the open-source Audacity audio editing software, [take a sec to read Tom Nardi's piece and get up to speed](. The short version is that a for-profit company has bought the trademark and the software, has announced plans to introduce telemetry where there was none, made ominous changes to the privacy policy that preclude people under the age of consent from using the software, and requested that all previous developers acquiesce to a change in the open-source license under which it is published. All the while, the company, Muse, says that it will keep the software open, and has walked back and forth on the telemetry issue. [tenacity-logo-dark-readme.png?w=250] What will happen to "Audacity"? Who knows. But also, who cares? At least one fork of the codebase has been made, with the telemetry removed and the old open licenses in place. The nicest thing about open source is that I don't care one bit if my software is named Audacity or [Tenacity]( and this is software I use every week for production of our podcast. But because I haven't paid any license fees, it costs me absolutely nothing to download the same software, minus some anti-features, under a different name. If the development community moves over to Tenacity, it'll all be fine. Tom thinks that the Audacity brand is too big to fail, and that Muse will have a hit on their hands. Especially if they start implementing new, must-have features, they could justify whatever plans they have in store, even if they're only available as a "freemium" Audacity Pro, with telemetry, under a more restrictive license. When that does happen, I'll have to make the choice between those features and the costs, but I won't be left out in the cold as long as the Tenacity fork gets enough eyes on it. So that's just more choice for the end user, right? That's cool. Compare this with closed source software. There, when the owner makes an unpopular decision, you simply have to take it or make the leap to an entirely different software. This can be costly if you've gotten good at using that software, and between licenses and learning, there's a lot of disincentive to switching. Not so in this case. If I don't want to be tracked while editing audio offline, I don't have to be. Woot. The elephant in the room is of course the development and debugging community, and it's way to early to be making predictions there. However, the same rules apply for devs and users: switching between two virtually identical codebases is as easy as git remote add origin or apt get install tenacity. (Unpaid) developers are free to choose among forks because they like the terms and conditions, because one group of people is more pleasant to work with, or because they like the color of one logo more than the other. Users are just as free to choose. Time will tell if Audacity ends up like the [zombie OpenOffice]( which is downloaded in spite of [the much superior LibreOffice]( just because of the former's name recognition. I know this split riles some people up, especially in the LibreOffice development community, and it does seem unfair that the better software somehow enjoys less reputation. But for those of us in the know, it's just more choice. And that's good, right? From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [The Case of the Mysterious Driveline Noise]( By [Lewin Day]( Lewin picks up a cheap car, and clever diagnosis saves him big money getting it back in shape. [Read more »]( [Virginia Apgar May Have Saved Your Life]( By [Kristina Panos]( Developing a test for newborns' viability saved them from being declared stillborn. [Read more »]( [Recycling Will Be Key To The Electric Vehicle Future]( By [Lewin Day]( How green is an electric vehicle? That depends on what you can do with the batteries. [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast 127: Whippletree Clamps, Sniffing Your Stomach Radio, Multimeter Hum Fix, and C64 Demo; No C64]( By [Hackaday Editors]( What happened last week on Hackaday? Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [Overdriving Vacuum Tubes and Releasing the Magic Light Within]( [You are Doomed to Learn WebAssembly]( [PlayStation Games on the GBA, With a Few Extra Steps]( [Tuning into Medical Implants with the RTL-SDR]( [Fractal Vise Holds Odd-Shaped Objects Tight]( [Hackaday]( NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA