Re: Legal status of Audacity in releases newer than Bullseye

At a glance, while Debian shouldn't distribute it and the community should certainly fork, I'm not sure it's technically a GPL violation. Is there a clickwrap page requiring you to agree to the privacy policy to use audacity? Does Audacity as they distribute it involve any network-related services?

GPL packages are allowed to ship with privacy policies (although they usually don't need them), and those policies normally cover your use of certain services alongside the software (here, telemetry services, which you're hardly "using," but you know, use a fork). Now, you can't be required to agree to the policy to use Audacity... that's a problem for them, but are they requiring it? As I mentioned above -- is it clickwrapped, or just linked to on their website?

Regards,

Daniel J. Hakimi

B.S. Philosophy, RPI 2012

B.S. Computer Science, RPI 2012

J.D. Cardozo Law 2015

On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 9:15 PM <jorkanofaln@tutanota.com> wrote:

To who it may concern

As you know the audacity project has been recently acquired by musegroup. Since then there have been a series of changes impacting Audacity. One such change is that telemetry has been included in newer versions of audacity no the one currently in the Debian repository for Bullseye and Sid (version 2.4.2), and has a requirement which both violates the GPLv2 license, the GPLv3 license as well as the Debian Free Software Guidelines. There has been a fork, which removes the questionable code, which can be found here: https://github.com/cookiengineer/audacity. Here is the github issue thread explaining the license violation issue with regards to the privacy policy: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213 What is the plan going forward, after the release of Debian 11 (since version 2.4.2 is unaffected by the licensing isuse) in regards to Audacity in the Debian package repository? Should this GPL2 violation be reported, if so to what organization? How will it impact the audacity package in bullseye-backports, bookworm as well as newer versions?

Looking forward towards your answers

Regards

Jorkano