Thanks, Kyle, for doing this post. It’s another one I can forward to people who aren’t sure why software libre/free software is such a great thing. I use Audacity myself, so this affected me directly. If the Audacity developers want to get some feedback on usage, they could do it as follows. Have an opt in for Audacity to collect stats in a plain text file or other human-readable format like XML. Every month or so point you to the stats file and ask you to upload it via a browser to their site (with a common URL, not some tracking URL). Since it’s a text file, you can inspect it (and edit it) before you send it. Anything happening behind the scenes is suspect and risky, and an upload-it-yourself scheme eliminates the need to add networking code bloat to Audacity.
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