If you caught my posts a few weeks back about some concerns with the Audacity project’s new owner, Jim Salter wrote another excellent piece that clarifies who this owner is and teases apart another bit of tension with the FLOSS community over a fork of MuseScore. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/audacitys-new-owner-is-in-another-fight-with-the-open-source-community/#p3
Category: Life Stream
Serious
This is how you know I am truly serious about bringing back a couple of old podcasts and starting a new one. I started to rewrite my media and feed management tools.
Promise
Keeping a promise with myself. The time has come. Only the first and a very rough outline to start. I am planning to bring my beer podcast back, too. And we may be creating a third.
Link Rot
Finished a good long read on link rot from The Atlantic by a former colleague, Jonathan Zittrain, that went far more in depth on work recently covered on CBC’s Spark podcast. Zittrain in his usual fashion not only sets the stage and quantifies the stakes, he surveys some of the work on solutions. I think this is important now more than ever, we will need some better solutions to continue fighting this pandemic and future ones and to reflect on this unique point in our history. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/
Inevitable
I understand the urge to express free political speech, regardless of ideology. Like the rest of modern society, that now relies on technology that is not easily mastered, certainly not at the scale of Gettr. I feel some schadenfreude at the sheer weight of the Dunning-Kruger effect here yet no one deserves to have any more of their data leaked. https://threatpost.com/trump-gettr-social-media-hacked-day-1/167574/
Who is Muse
Libre Arts has a good write up from May on the formation of Muse (aka Ultimate Guitar) and their spate of acquisitions, including Audacity. Audacity isn’t the first FLOSS they acquired. The comments speculate on how they actually acquired something that in theory is free. https://librearts.org/2021/05/ultimate-guitar-launches-muse-group-and-acquires-audacity/
Next Question
Jim Salter at Ars Technica has more on the Muse/Audacity story. The changes haven’t been released yet, coming in 3.03. The community of Audacity users responded months ago. The next question I have is whether Muse has any sort of authentic alignment with Audacity and FLOSS generally. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/no-open-source-audacity-audio-editor-is-not-spyware/
Audacity
I saw this thanks to Cory Doctorow earlier today and am finally getting a chance to read up on the shenanigans by Muse with regards to Audacity. I too await the hopefully not too eventual libre fork. When will companies learn? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57721967
Nonsense
Back on more of my old nonsense. Enjoying the upgrades.
Complete
Completed migrating all my self hosted services over to a new set up. tl;dr: all based on docker, with persistent storage as needed, and config in source control. Non-tech tl;dr: I will be less stressed keeping everything up to date.