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 <jorkanof...@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
>

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